


Astra Inclinant

by oblivioluna, rabbit_hearted



Category: Purple Hyacinth - Ephemerys & Sophism (Webcomic)
Genre: (to future lovers? who knows), Angst, Canon Compliant, F/M, Lovers To Enemies, Noir/Thriller Fiction, Pre-Canon, happy holidays we're about to make you all cry, luna and rabbit came for everyone's necks and each other's, so much of it, the fictional child of two romantics with one braincell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-06
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 18:47:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 29,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27920998
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oblivioluna/pseuds/oblivioluna, https://archiveofourown.org/users/rabbit_hearted/pseuds/rabbit_hearted
Summary: Lauren Sinclair has always found the beauty in broken things. It is no surprise, then, that she takes an interest in a boy who breaks for a living, and becomes intrigued in the pieces he leaves behind before ever meeting him.(It is XX24, and Detective Lauren Sinclair has been put in charge of hunting down the elusive Purple Hyacinth. Not even weeks later, Hanbury Street ties their paths together once - just once - and puts them on a colliding course that will forever change history.It is only natural, after all, for a monstrous boy and merciless girl to take an interest in each other.)
Relationships: Lauren Sinclair/Kieran White
Comments: 28
Kudos: 95





	1. Astra Inclinant

**Author's Note:**

> _Astra inclinant, sed non obligant._  
>    
> The stars incline us, they do not bind us.

To Kieran's chagrin, his first thought is one that he accidentally voices aloud, poised on the precipice of the windowsill like a gargoyle.

“You weren’t supposed to be here.”

It’s an asinine statement, one that makes his target’s lips twitch in a mirthless, pandering way. _Of course_ Angoisse isn’t supposed to be here, propped up in the dark like a pale little bowling pin, waiting patiently for his death appointment.

It takes a moment for his eyes to adjust to the scene, rendering first a pale fist, then an arm, a torso, a little slice of a scowling face. For a long, absurdly peaceful moment, they simply stare at one another.

“Come inside, Hyacinth,” Angoisse finally murmurs, sounding perturbed, as though disappointed that his own murder has turned out to be such a boring affair. Up close he looks gaunt, with gray, papery skin like ruddied snow and deep-set eyes framed by crow’s feet — older, or perhaps more tired than the photograph he’d been given had suggested.

Conceding to the fact that there isn’t any further use for pretenses, Kieran obediently drops off of the windowsill and withdraws his sword, but he doesn’t move towards the man. “I see that my reputation precedes me,” he notes dryly.

“Oh, I’ve heard about you,” the older man muses. “You and your _morals_.” He spits the word with the inflection one might reserve for words such as _infectious disease._

“And what have you heard?” Kieran drawls. He could end this now, of course. He could close his fist around Angoisse’s throat, sweep his legs out from under him, crack his skull like a soft-boiled egg. But he doesn’t, because it’s then that Angoisse reaches for his hip.

“Oh, dear,” Kieran sighs, flicking a petulant glance up at the ceiling. “I _hate_ guns.”

“You don’t kill unless ordered, for one,” Angoisse remarks thoughtfully. He withdraws his gun slowly, raising the barrel until it’s facing him, an unblinking eye in the inky dark. “Why is that?”

Kieran is still peering down the barrel when he replies. “I have no use for killing at random.”

Angoisse’s watery eyes narrow. “But it isn’t _just_ that, is it?”

Kieran lunges for the gun, temporarily blinded by the crack of the flash as Angoisse fires once, twice, sloppy, misdirected shots that hit the south wall and and the window, respectively. Kieran peers outside for signs of movement on the sidewalk — He’ll need to finish this quickly, now that they’ve made noise.

But by the time Kieran turns back from the window, it seems, curiously, that Angoisse has lost all of his fight. They face one another like predators, stripped clean and laid bare.

“Would you like to know what I think of your morals, Hyacinth?” Angoisse murmurs. “I think that you’re a fraud. I think that you’ll burn in Hell with the rest of them.”

He drops to his knees, his papery eyelids fallen shut, palms clasped neatly behind his back. When Kieran doesn’t move, he pops one eye open, assessing him boredly. “Do it, then.”

His murder is a quiet, undramatic affair, a thrust and a sickening squelch as the blade burrows through the man's chest, skewering him cleanly, like an animal on a spit.

_I think that you’ll burn in Hell with the rest of them._

“I know that,” Kieran says, his tone hollow. “How couldn’t I?”

* * *

“Three days?”

“Three days,” Detective Cooper confirms. “We’d better bag this up to autopsy. You know, the longer these corpses stay out, it’s harder to investigate time of death. Especially in—” He gestures around. “A place like this.”

“Perfect place for a murder, really,” March comments blithely, taking in the dingy settings of the butcher shop. He glances around the place - it’s all bloody in here, dim lights flashing, their bulbs broken. The glass panels do nothing to conceal the scent of rotting and stank meat, flies buzzing around. “Your thoughts, Sinclair?”

“Just finishing up,” Lauren says evenly, flashing him a wan smile as she finishes writing something down on her notebook. “Anyhow, this doesn’t match the patterns I’ve been jotting down for weeks. Someone’s targeting specific victims, but this is an interesting fluke. This is no random killer we’re talking about.”

She wonders if he can see the spark in her eyes. The spark that makes her want to toy around with a bloody crime scene like a kid with a puzzle, with the enthusiasm of a child in a candy shop. What is it about the death and despair of a blackened city that attracts a girl of high upbringing down here, all the way down into dark places where she should not be? Anyone could take a good look at her - golden eyes, hair like scarlet rivers - and point her away from a life upholding the law. But what they do not understand is that underneath all that tall elegance and careful speech is something long buried.

Sometimes she calls it grief.

Sometimes she calls it maddening rage, and would gladly let it gnash at her heart with claws and teeth.

“I’ll take this down to the 11th,” she says, eventually. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle this.”

“You do that,” March says, giving his approval. “And - mind your way around the evidence. There’s fragile stuff in those bags.”

“Fragile?” she asks, just as a plastic bag shines up at her from the floor. She narrowly avoids stepping on it as she crosses under the yellow tape woven around the scene.

What looks up at her next to the bag is a perfectly pressed purple hyacinth, scent sickly sweet even from here.

“March,” she calls out loudly. “We have a signature.”

* * *

It's far too late when Kieran finally realizes that Angoisse never actually meant to shoot him. In retrospect, it’s all painfully obvious: The sloppy marksmanship, the hollow taunts, the posturing. Angoisse knew that he was going to die long before Kieran stepped foot in that room.

The purpose of the gunfire, rather, was to alert someone _else_ to Kieran’s presence.

_“You don’t kill unless ordered, for one—”_

When the butcher wrenches open the door, the first thing Kieran notices is that he’s wearing an apron stained with entrails. _What a pair we make,_ he thinks morbidly. The man has a face like custard, round and pudgy, lips pulled back around a soundless scream.

Kieran holds out a bloodstained hand, palm up. “You need to—”

The sentence withers beneath the pulse of blood in his ears. _You need to run_ , he doesn’t say. _Far away from me._ He doesn’t say that, because he cannot. Because he knows, then, that must kill this man who has committed no crime beyond that which tangled his fate with a monster’s. The man dives for the doorway and slips on the soaked floorboards, tearing at the window curtain on his way down.

Kieran pulls the blade out of Angoisse’s chest hard enough that he skids back on his heels, thrown by the momentum.

“ _Please_ ,” the butcher gasps. He reaches forward and his fingers close around nothing, scrabbling uselessly for purchase over the slick floorboards. “I have a family. Kids—”

Kieran lunges for his leg and closes his damp palm around his ankle, yanking him back like a tree root. And just like that, he’s twelve years old again, head bowed and wrists clasped, numb to the whip and knowing it all the same. “I’m sorry,” he sputters hoarsely. Even after he plunges the blade through his chest, he is still saying it, again and again, like an incantation to a false god.

_I'm sorry._

* * *

It’s Detective Cooper who tells her that the butcher case - under the name of Anton Feltsman - will be shelved. The reason for this being is that he was not the main target. The victim upstairs, a rich merchant by the name of Teren Angoisse, was the killer’s main target. Feltsman had merely been collateral damage. No wonder it hadn’t matched the patterns.

“Run the facts by me again,” March says, as he brings the car to a stop.

“Two targets from point-blank range. Two stab wounds in Feltsman, and four in Angoisse. Since Angoisse was the main target, the killer took their sweet time intimidating them. Broken glass and torn curtains show signs of a struggle and an attempted escape. The .45 ACP cartridge matches Angoisse’s gun. He was the one who fired, not the assassin. Whoever we’re dealing with knew that guns could be traced, and chose to use some sort of longsword. The type is unidentifiable - most likely an overseas or foreign make.”

The automobile doors slam shut as they get out at the same time. They’re both out of uniform - Lauren in a shirt and suspenders, hair tied into a low knot. It’s better if the people they confront don’t know they’re coming, after all.

“I’ve tried asking around, but the industries here don’t import metals,” March says, motioning for her to follow him. “The sword must be foreign make.”

“Dead end?”

“Dead end,” he confirms, smiling slightly at her. “You know, if it makes you feel better, you’ve given us more leads than a lot of detectives have in the past.”

“It’s not enough,” she insists, as he opens the door to the florist’s shop. The bell tinkles loudly in the air, and the small corner shop is filled with a rainbow assortment of flowers, some in wrapped paper, others in bunches, wet with dew.

“Well, for starters, how old were you when you graduated from the Academy?”

“Eighteen. Why?”

“You’re nineteen,” he says calmly, staring her down.

“That doesn’t matter.”

“It’s been a year and you’ve made historic progress, Sinclair,” he sighs, chuckling. “You’re never going to be satisfied, are you?”

“Some of us are high achievers,” she quips, smirking to herself as he shakes his head. Sometimes she regrets not being close to any of the IU - not even March. They’re both easy going with each other, but have never been close, functioning strictly as work partners. Perhaps if she’d let go of what was holding her back, much less her impatience for answers in life, period, she would’ve let him take her under his wing.

“Hello!” chirps the eager florist at front, a man in his thirties, around March’s age. “May I help with anything?”

“You can,” Lauren says politely, patting the countertop lightly. “Would you happen to have any more stocks of purple hyacinths? It’s for an occasion.”

“How big of a delivery are we talking?”

She shrugs. “A truckload, maybe. Enough to last someone a year’s worth, perhaps?”

“Miss--”

“Detective,” March corrects, snapping open his badge. He smiles thinly. “Would you mind telling us about one of your clients?”

When he runs for it, March holds her back from giving chase. “I’ll corner him. You take the back rooms!”

Lauren nods, but not without hesitating - she’d desperately wanted to pursue the man - and makes for the back doors. The unspoken rule of detective work is that sometimes, the simplest solution is the correct one, and usually, the things no one wants anyone else to see are hidden in the shadows. When she tugs open the storage closet where the remaining flowers are kept, a large tarp covers a couple of arrangements in the back. She yanks the chilly fabric off a large collection of purple hyacinths, at the same time March drags the florist out in handcuffs, looking slightly exasperated at his flowers being mistreated. Purple petals tumble in the air, skidding on the floor. _Hyacinthus orentalis._

“Found his stocks,” she says primly. “Let’s get a witness statement and get back to the precinct.”

* * *

For days after, Kieran scrubs his hands until they’re raw, knuckles cracked and pink. And then he washes them again, and again, only satisfied when his skin is so sore that he can hardly flex his fingers. The scent of lye lingers like a mist over what lurks beneath it: Salt and rust and, just beneath that, the nectar musk of an apology.

“Will the butcher be missed?”

The Messenger doesn’t mean the question in a literal sense. He means to ask whether the man has any connections that could pose a threat.

“No,” Kieran replies flatly. “I looked into him after I left the scene.”

“And?”

_“I have a family. Kids—”_

"He didn’t know anything about what Angoisse was doing upstairs.” If Kieran were to answer the Messenger’s question literally, he would say, yes, the butcher will be missed. He will be missed by his customers, who will gawk at the crime scene like cowed rabbits. He will be missed by his wife and his children and the hapless, inconsequential little life that Kieran tore him from like a rotted tooth. 

The Messenger tilts his masked head. If Kieran could see his face, he supposes he’d be squinting. “And what, exactly, happened? Such a slip-up is unusual for you, Hyacinth.”

Kieran presses his lips together, considering his response tactically. “I … made a lapse in judgement. I thought that I’d have time to do reconnaissance on the building, but Angoisse was already there when I arrived.” He swallows thickly. “The butcher was another unexpected development.” 

“I would hope, then, that this was an isolated incident. The Leader has eyes on the situation, as I’m sure you’re aware.”

“Of course.”

“However,” the Messenger adds, “He is pleased with your performance, in spite of the _unexpected development_.” He throws out the praise like an afterthought, a table scrap to a starving mutt. When Kieran nods mutely, the Messenger flicks his palm in a gesture meant to communicate that he is dismissed.

And like a good, placated mutt, he turns on his heel and leaves.

* * *

“...And there’s the matter of the past murders within the 11th. Whoever is conducting these homicides clearly wants to agitate the upper class.”

“It’s no coincidence that only supporters of the monarchy are being targeted,” Andrew Lawes says. The forensic unit and IU have all piled into one large office, dozens and dozens of seemingly random case files and photos taped to a board. Evidence both recent and old. They’d tried stringing the pieces together, but it’s been a fruitless attempt so far. “And dealt with harshly. Grace and I have been looking through past cadavers - whoever is torturing innocent souls clearly has an agenda. They’re not working alone, either.”

“He.”

“What?”

“He,” Lauren says slowly, walking forward. “You said the more recent cases are done by sword wound. Women statistically work with poisons and daggers that would inflict less damage. The Golden Viper, for one. It’s guaranteed we’re working with the Phantom Scythe, but whoever’s been committing these crimes wants to be noticed. Unlike any of the others.”

“You think - if it is a he,” March says slowly, “he wants to be noticed?”

“Why else would you sign?” she murmurs under her breath, barely a whisper. “Why leave flowers behind?”

_Purple hyacinths._

“So he really is back, then,” drones one detective from the back. “The Purple Hyacinth.”

She can feel the entire room tense.

“Could the flowers mean anything?” another asks.

“Florists don’t arrange by meaning. We can count that possibility out.” adds Cooper. “They could be a signal for— _”_

“He wants something,” she says abruptly. “He wants - attention. Fear.” It’s like a dial. She tunes out the noise as she steps back, sinking into a chair, posing languidly as she cups her hands together, mouth pressing on the soft parts of her skin. There is a design here. There is a message. He is speaking, this killer, and she will understand this message if it is the last thing she does. Whoever is committing these crimes has no heart, and she knows this should repulse her. And it does - it makes her shiver with disgust. But whatever they call terrible is beautiful, too, and so she quivers before a morbid painting of blood and history, too akin to the phantoms on her fingers. Amity. Whiteriver. Baker. Two months, four months, a week. He pops up and they can never predict where he does, only finding the hyacinth petals he leaves in his wake.

“Our killer is sending a warning sign,” she says, and the entire office falls silent. “He is… arrogant. Egoistical. He wants the entire population to fear him enough so that he can continue his misdeeds even while we’re breathing down his backs. And we can’t catch him through our usual methods because he’s watching us, too. He’s playing a game with us. Watching to see what we’ll do as he slowly makes his way up to the upper class - and the royal family. It’s not much of a stretch to consider why he would only be targeting wealthy citizens with connections to the monarchy. Modus operandi is none. He doesn’t _have_ one, except for a small pattern - he targets lone persons. Never two or more. This is not out of mercy. It’s so he can make his kills as elaborate and noticeable as possible.”

No one speaks for a while until March does.

“Detective Sinclair,” he says, nodding slightly, “I believe you should be the one to handle this case.”

* * *

“Why the flowers?”

Kieran is playing darts when the question is asked of him. It happens the same way it always does, which is to say that he hears it from an overeager guttersnipe with loose lips, posturing in some dingy Scythe haunt as though they aren’t all on the same fast track to Hell. The man, Dimitri Melnik, burps and wipes his damp lip with the back of his palm. “Heard it’s a calling card.”

Kieran pauses, twisting the dart between his forefinger and thumb. “Is that so?”

The man waves his palm vaguely. “Something like that.” He turns to Beau Hedley, a man with a thin, rat-like face and a perpetually sleazy disposition, and holds up two beefy fingers. “You think this kid can beat me, Hedley?”

He shrugs noncommittally but reaches into his pocket and withdraws a few crumpled bills. “Double or nothing on White.”

Kieran tightens his jaw and throws the dart in lieu of answering. It sinks neatly into the bull’s eye, eliciting opposite reactions from the two men. “It isn’t.”

Hedley leans around him, gathering the pooled bills from the center of the table. “Isn’t?”

“A calling card.” He grimaces as he pluck the darts out of the board. “I have no use for posturing.” 

“What is it, then?” Melnik responds, twitching his fingers at the bartender in what is, in Kieran’s opinion, a rather rude gesture to indicate he’d like a refill of his beer.

“I’m afraid the Q&A portion of the evening has ended,” Kieran drawls. He gathers his jacket over the crook of his arm, making to leave.

Hedley’s snort behind him gives him pause. “Thinks he’s better than us,” he mumbles. “That’s what it is.”

Still facing the door, Kieran swipes the man’s dagger off of the table, spins it around between his fingertips, and tosses it over his shoulder. It whips past Hedley’s face, close enough to rustle a strand of mousy hair behind his ear, and sinks into the center of the dartboard.

“Perhaps you might try not believing everything you hear,” Kieran suggests. His words are conversational but his tone is cold, absent of his usual bravado. “It’s terribly unproductive.”

Bravely, Melnik is the first to speak. He plucks Hedley’s dagger out of the dart board with a dull thud and tosses it back onto the table. “You’re the same as the rest of them, Hyacinth. Fancy calling card or not.”

Kieran barks a laugh as he shrugs on his coat. “And that, Melnik,” Kieran replies, turning to leave, “Is the first wise thing you’ve said all evening.”

* * *

The thing about Lauren Sinclair is that she’s not very keen on letting things go _._

At first, the thrill of a new case doesn’t hit her as hard. She’s just finished up an old one, after all, and a new one this suddenly seems a bit of an impediment, if not a complete inconvenience. But the IU thinks of her highly, and she would be lying if she didn’t feel some sense of pride in the way March and the others look at her as she accepts one case file after another.

The thing about the Ardhalis Police Department, however, is that they are unknowingly harboring someone far more selfish than would do them actual good in their ranks.

She doesn’t need twenty-four hours to mull it over. She’s already decided to go after this lead like a bloodhound. The Phantom Scythe’s most vicious lapdog and attacker could lead her straight to the answers she’s been chasing after years.

It’s all for them.

It’s always been for them.

She hadn’t wanted to be a detective for the chase, after all. Not at first. Before the daisy crown had been crushed under the wheels of an unsuspecting vehicle and her innocence along with it, she’d wanted to protect a city full of people, good people, that deserved better things. But as she took the post she’d hungered after her whole life, it became something else. Something about seeing the underbelly of a shining coin changes you - makes you fit to its mold instead of the reverse. Detective Sinclair is the only truth that exists in Ardhalis City, and Lauren Sinclair, poised and elegant woman of high class, is a lie. The biggest lie that exists. Late nights have pressed a cup of grief to her lips, a wine she drinks eagerly. The sight of bullets and blood have buried whatever fear of violence she had beneath her skin. Every death and injustice and lost case she cannot solve swipes purple shades under her eyes and decorates her gold irises with a tint that darkens as the night does.

Every step she takes, the shadows swirl at her feet, and maybe that’s why she dreams of him again. She dreams of him and her parents, and sometimes, the dreams repeat.

This one is new.

Instead of a garden, they’re both by a lake. She’s twelve again, in a lovely lace dress. Dandelion fluff trails through the air as he looks over at her, a sprig of wheat moving up and down in his mouth. For some odd reason, Dylan Rosenthal looks incredibly sad.

“You know, you don’t have to chase after me,” he says, smiling somberly. “I’m fine where I am.”

“No you’re not,” she blurts out impulsively. “No, you’re not.”

“How do you know that?”

She falls silent. Dylan plucks a wildflower up in his small, childish fingers, twirling it. The dandelion sparkles in the sunlight, not quite turned to white ash yet.

“Maybe it’s just because you’re not happy,” he says eventually.

Lauren covers her eyes with her arm. They lie side by side on a low grassy hill, the stems tickling at their bare feet. “I haven’t felt happy in a long time.”

“Can you at least let go, then? Come on, Ren.”

“Don’t ‘Ren’ me, Dylan--”

“I’m serious.” He tries to contort his face into disappointment, but fails. “Can you let go?”

She contemplates this for a while, tapping her clasped hands together. But the longer she hesitates, the darker the storm clouds seem to get. Eventually, the rain starts pouring, and she doesn’t flinch as a torrent of cold water hits her skin. She couldn’t even if she tried. She walks a tightrope, tugging at the dark thing haunting her heart, but it won’t let go. Perhaps this grief and her are the same, and that’s why she can’t leave it be.

Either way—

“Sorry, Dylan,” she says, drawing him into a hug as the rain falls. “Can’t.”

* * *

Kieran feels her before he sees her, hovering behind him like a cool patch of water in a pond.

“I heard your little mission went tits up.”

Belladonna Davenport is standing in a slice of dirty blue light, one hip cocked casually against the brick wall of the alleyway. She’s puffing idly on a cigarette and watching him with faint, unsmiling amusement.

“My little mission,” Kieran replies dryly, drawing to a slow stop in front of her. It’s been some time since he’s last seen her, but she looks the same as always, a vague imprint of something human. She tilts her sharp chin up towards his face and exhales, emitting a thin plume of smoke out of her half-parted lips like a draft through an open doorway. 

“I’d love to know what you’ve heard.”

“Always so unperceptive,” Bella remarks dully. “Didn’t we learn basic reconnaissance when we were children?”

Kieran rolls his eyes. “Like you’ve never had a botched mission before.”

“No,” she murmurs agreeably. “But then again, I’m not the _esteemed_ Purple Hyacinth.” Bella tilts her head. “Even a dullard like Angoisse was able to outsmart you. What does that say about you?”

“I took care of Angoisse,” Kieran grits, his jaw rolling. “No use crying over spilled milk, is there?”

She hums contemplatively, snubbing out her cigarette with her toe. “But it wasn’t just Angoisse, was it?” When she flicks her coral eyes back to his face, there’s a cold little spark there, a match in a darkened room. “That poor little butcher,” she purrs. “Your first collateral kill.”

Bile rises in Kieran's throat, hot and sour. He tamps it down like a blanket over a flame, schooling his expression into one of cold impassivity as he stumbles away from her.

“It’s been wonderful catching up, Bella.” His voice is strangled, a little too taut, and he knows that she can hear it. Her ears perk like a shark on the scent of blood.

“There’s just one more thing,” she murmurs. “Since you’re so terribly _unperceptive_ , I thought I’d fill you in.”

He pauses as he’s about to turn away, lingering against his better judgement, a moth on the edge of a flame. She grins thinly, a sharp little shape like a waning moon. “A little birdie told me that you’ll be getting your next assignment shortly. I can’t say I’m not jealous that it isn’t mine.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Too many pawns on the board,” Bella replies vaguely. “It’s getting awfully crowded, don’t you think?”

Kieran dips his chin until they’re eye-level. When he speaks, it’s through his teeth. “We’ve never needed to wax poetic with one another, Bella,” he spits.

“Is that a threat?” She edges a slender brow into her hairline. “What’re you going to do, kill me?”

They face one another in silence, licking their wounds and snapping their jaws. “Don’t think I’m above it,” Kieran replies, but they both know that the threat rings hollow.

“Oh, I know _you_ aren’t,” she murmurs, rolling her eyes.

Kieran steps back, his ears ringing with a low sense of dread. “What do you know?”

“You’ll find out soon enough, Hyacinth.” Her tone is dulcet as she tilts her head towards the mouth of the alley. “Hanbury Street is lovely at this time of year, is it not?”

And then she’s gone, as slick and soundless as she arrived, melting into the foot traffic like a shadow in the sun.

* * *

Almost nothing about the Purple Hyacinth is consistent.

Trying to pin him down is like pinning down a shadow. She has faced tougher cases than this, ones with solid evidence and solid patterns. Cases that have involved Phantom Scythe killers and victims both. Every time she is done with a case, she files the information neatly in her desk, or throws her endless scribbles on bits and pieces of random paper torn off at random intervals to keep up with her mind in the trash. With him, the evidence builds and builds until she is always the one staying late at the office, staring at a board decked in gray and black and white, her own handwriting in curls around the evidence. At the center of a spiderweb in red is a portrait. She does not know what he looks like. No one does. The jaw, the fearsome brow, the darkness in his phantom figure is all guesswork.

She cannot uncover him.

She knows what she wants, but all that he wants leads her into every dead end.

The IU knows this, of course, but it’s why they have entrusted their best and brightest to tackle the case - even on barely five hours of sleep, and a haunted look in her eyes that starts to become more apparent as the weeks go on.

Sometimes it makes her think he’s playing this game with her and her alone, but she isn’t foolish. And yet.

And yet.

“Don’t go too deep into the investigation,” Grace had commented while she and Lauren were getting coffee from the nearby breakroom. “We’re better off not poking at the minds of killers. You be careful with a case like that, okay?”

People like him are manipulative, ruthless, heartless, desensitized. When she looks at his picture long enough, she recites this list in her head to remind her who she’s fighting. Us and them. The police against the Phantom Scythe. He is above the law, flashing teeth at it, laughing at them all, daring them to catch him. When she stares long enough, the seed of her hatred blooms into a thicket of rotten daisies, winding around a heart that is no longer innocent. How dare he live with so much blood on his hands and act like it is nothing. How dare he live like this when she is stuck in the same place she was ten years ago. He’s no serial killer, no psychopath. Just a ruthless assassin. By all means, he should’ve escaped her notice.

She hates him. He is her enemy. It is a litany. She hates him. She will always hate him.

_Right, the next train will leave at 10:45. The years to come will be the brightest Ardhalis has ever known._

_What’s it like being a murderer?_ she asks herself late at night, feeling her pillow come awash with saltwater. She remembers rain, the ribbon on a hat, her father’s smile. In the morning, she wakes, eyes rubbed raw and red, still grasping for a pair of hands that always disappear. _What’s it like killing everything you’ve ever loved?_

“Do you mind if March monitors the case?” Cooper asks one day.

“Does the IU not trust me?” The fact that March wanted to oversee her should’ve meant nothing. It did mean nothing.

“It’s not that, it’s—”  
“I can handle it,” she says, cutting him off firmly. “The case is mine.”

And yet.

_You are mine to destroy._

_You’re a monster,_ she thinks at night, stroking a hand over his picture. _Nothing else._

But it doesn’t stop her from staring at it all night long.

Perhaps it is because a monster recognizes a monster.

* * *

He gets his confirmation a day later, and it’s so much worse than he could have possibly fathomed.

Belladonna’s tip was correct, of course, though Kieran never truly doubted that fact. She's always had a knack for seeking the rot and fester out of the city’s cracks. The envelope feels like cold, dead weight in his hands as he pulls it out from underneath the bench.

“You’re being trusted with this mission for a reason, Hyacinth.” The words are muffled through the mesh divider of the confessional, deceptively soft. “The Leader sees great potential in you.”

“What an honor,” Kieran deadpans, breaking the wax seal with his thumb. He’s illogically careful with it, as though unwrapping a gift. “What is it, then? Another—”

He reads the words once, twice, three times, but they don’t register immediately, teasing at the edges of his periphery like specters. He opens his mouth and then snaps it shut once more, fearful of what will happen when he speaks.

The Messenger is the first to break the silence. “You will dispose of the targets efficiently. And,” he adds, his tone pointed, “ _Without_ unforeseen developments.”

Kieran pulls in a gasping breath and it ricochets through his chest cavity like a death rattle. When he finally finds his voice, it doesn’t sound like him. “Twenty five,” he whispers. Immortalized in time, his targets’ faces stare placidly up at him, looking resigned, somehow, as though aware of what he plans to do. “Twenty _five—”_

“I trust that you don’t mean to question the Leader’s judgement,” The Messenger murmurs warningly. “These decisions aren’t made without deliberation.” 

“It’s—”

It’s a bloodbath. A massacre.

_“Hanbury Street is lovely at this time of year, is it not?”_

Kieran doesn’t recall leaving the cathedral until he's already outside, cold air biting at his exposed skin like teeth. He stumbles aimlessly through the streets, only registering that he’s walked into a woman when she whirls on him, her eyes narrowed. “Watch where you’re going,” she snaps.

“I’m —” _I’m sorry._ His tongue is thick and sandpapery in his mouth, and when he draws a breath, it smells like rot. “Sorry.”

But the woman is long gone by then. Kieran is alone, crouched in an alley between a dumpster and an abandoned bicycle that's covered in such a thick layer of rust that its original color is unrecognizable. He steels his palms against his knees, grinding his teeth against the urge to retch. When a man spots him there, his spectacled gaze narrows, lips pulled into a pitying sneer.

“Lousy drunk,” he mutters over his shoulder.

* * *

“He’s guilty,” she says in five seconds tops, closing the case. “You owe me five, Lawes.”

“I guess that’s why they call you the IU’s prodigy,” Andrew grumbles, but not unkindly, as he fishes in his pocket for a wad of cash. It goes into Lauren’s open palm, and she accepts in turn, despite having more wealth than she needs. In a setting like this - all dim lights and smoke whirling around the cabaret sphere - she seems out of place next to the forensic unit and half the investigative unit off-duty. March is still running things down with Cooper down at the office, and Lauren had practically been dragged by her lapel on a break, so here she lies: all prim and proper elegance dripping gold, watching the people around her bet on who can solve formerly gone-cold criminal cases the fastest.

She’s the fastest so far.

“Toss me another one.”

“Lauren—”

“The cigarette,” she corrects, snapping her fingers. The heat has become a sweltering compress, and she comes to the sudden realization that she does not _fit._ A misplaced white glove on a blackening city. In one swift movement, she loosens her suspenders, ruffling her auburn hair free. It falls around her shoulders as she takes the cigarette in her hands, wincing as the bitter scent of clove reaches her nose.

“You don’t usually smoke,” comments a detective from earlier.

She blows, watching tendrils of gray snake in the air. _The first and last poison in my lungs._ “I don’t really care what I usually do at this point.”

“You’re acting weird,” Grace says. “How much sleep did you get last night?!”

“I didn’t count,” Lauren says blithely.

“I think you need to start dialing back your clock.”

“I don’t own one,” she says sarcastically, smiling sharply. She whistles, clicking her fingers as the next file arrives in her fingers. Lauren fingers with the loop in her belt as she scans this one, a thousand puzzle pieces moving in her mind. They’re all the same, really. The cases.

The only difference between all of them is the motive.

“You ever think about becoming a criminal?” Andrew says, throwing a dart at the board on the wall.

 _Sometimes,_ Lauren thinks, turning a page, _I fear I’ve already become one._

* * *

He doesn’t know what time it is when he finally returns to his apartment. There is a scream lingering somewhere over the tip of his tongue that he can’t quite grasp, and so he simply stands there, his mouth curled numbly around the shape. He wonders if that’s something they’d excised from him root and stem, a phantom limb he recalls only in memory.

Kieran stalks across the length of his drawing room and rips his portfolio open until it’s splayed wide like a cadaver. He’s certain that he must have captured this sensation in charcoal once, and so he searches for it, flipping through the pages with reckless abandon. _“I have a family. Kids—”_

A silhouette of Saint Lawrence bridge at dusk, an apple crate filled with tulip stems, a butterfly poised on a swing-set.

“ _Family—”_

A child sitting on his father’s shoulders, a rat emerging from a rusted pipe, rain glancing against a stained glass mosaic.

_“Kids—”_

Desperation twists in his gut like a serrated blade. Nothing fits. Nothing _fits_. It’s déjà vu in reverse, the insipid exercise of clawing through the recesses of his mind for a feeling he can’t recall. It’s something hollower than hollow — a void, and the memory of the thing that used to exist there all the same.

Kieran grips a fistful of the pages and yanks them free from their metal spine, feeling nothing at all as he tears the drawings in half, then quarters. He isn’t wild. He is quiet, methodical as he deconstructs the pages with nimble precision, smaller, and smaller still,until the remains drift listlessly through the air like ticker tape.

When he’s finished, the room resembles a shaken snow-globe. He sinks to his knees in the center of all of his destruction and bends his neck until his forehead rests against the floor, recalling the way that Angoisse looked just before Kieran killed him. Head bowed and spine bent, the universal posture of prey.

“Get out of my head,” he whispers to no one.

* * *

“I,” sighs Will, “am two seconds away from snapping.”

“Aren’t we all,” teases Lauren, nudging him. “It’s December, Will. The break’s almost here. Everyone’s going to be shut up in their homes when the snowstorms come. Then you’ll get some semblance of peace.”

“Like you get any down at the IU?”

“Fair,” she says, laughing a bit over her coffee, giving him a fond look when he adds a bit of cream in. They know each other’s habits well enough to work as an efficient team whenever she comes up to the patrol unit in the central 11th building. He’s always there to show her to the archives and get what she needs, and she accompanies him and his sergeant work.

Two prodigies, side by side. It made sense that at one point, the entire Sinclair circle had thought her and Will a future couple - granted, the Hawkes family didn’t entirely approve of her line of work - but they’ve never been that way with each other. Maybe it’s because they recognize that the person underneath their individual burdens isn’t someone they’d ever want to be with. Maybe it’s because on his end, he does and will not ever understand her grief, and she can’t comprehend his own pressures.

They’re too busy trying to save everyone else to save themselves.

“You’re taking in new recruits in May, right?”

“I am,” Will confirms, as they stride down the hall to the office, exiting the breakroom. “A ton of new recruits from the academy. Erikson, Tolya, Zhao...Ladell,” he finishes off, groaning.

“What?”

“I remember reading her applicant file. She’s a _mess._ Perfect marksmanship scores, but with the attitude of the sun.”

“Bright and loving?”

“Carefree and ridiculous,” he groans, and Lauren laughs harder.

“At least you don’t have to go chasing after a myth,” she remarks, sipping at the dark liquid. It’s then that Will stops her in her tracks, a hand on her shoulder. She shies away a bit as he inspects her pale face - however much makeup she puts on, it’s still not enough to entirely conceal the sallow undertones beneath her eyes, the nervous flutter of her throat bobbing up and down.

“Tell me the truth, Lauren,” he says concernedly. “Are you okay?”

“Will—”

“I know they put you on the Purple Hyacinth’s trail.” He frowns down at her. “You’ve got to tell them that if you don’t solve this one, it’s not your fault. No one has ever caught him. And I know how incredible you are. I just don’t want this to kill you.”

She almost laughs at his choice of words, and if she had, it would’ve come out as a darkened rasp. Something more like the Detective Sinclair that haunts dark alleyways and chases after figures in the snow, not Lauren Sinclair who is benevolent and laughs alongside a childhood best friend.

It would scare him. So she doesn’t, and swallows it down harshly.

“I’m fine,” she says. She’s said this a million times, and maybe if she says it a million more, it’ll become true. “I’m fine. I honestly am. Can we get going to the archives now?”

Will doesn’t believe her at all from the look in his eyes, but gestures for her to walk with him anyways.

* * *

On the evening of the eleventh, he spreads the photographs of his targets out on his kitchen table. He isn’t sure why he does it. He's spent enough time staring at the file that their immortalized expressions linger behind his eyelids like a sunspot.

Tomorrow, he’ll drag their graying limbs down Hanbury Street and arrange them like stiff-lipped marionette dolls, mouths perpetually bent around the memory of their last scream. They won’t look peaceful, as though they could have ostensibly drifted off to sleep. The rigor mortis will affix their expressions permanently into ones of naked terror, frozen in time like fossils in resin.

And in his most egregious crime of all, he’ll deny them their most basic right to privacy. They’ll be splayed wide for all to see, public spectacles even in death. After it all, he’ll have taken even that from them.

Sleep doesn’t find him for some time. He closes his eyes and feels flames lapping at his skin, closing in like feral dogs, eating at him until he's ash and bone. _“I think you’ll burn in Hell with the rest of them.”_

When he finally falls asleep, he dreams of blood.

* * *

When he strikes again, she’s waiting.

The pen-cap wobbles in between her teeth as she circles a phrase in red. Her hair falls around her shoulders, slightly tousled, and her reddish-brown detective coat is slung around her shoulders. She doesn’t like the bitter taste of caffeine, but it keeps her awake through the coffee she treats like a savior.

“Sinclair!” One of the lower-ranking detectives comes crashing into her space, slamming her hands down on the desk. “March - March’s called for you and the others. _It’s a massacre.”_

“What?!” she demands, standing up abruptly, papers flying everywhere. “What happened?”

The blonde girl swallows nervously. “Hanbury Street. It’s—” She breaks off, fighting tears. “There’s so much blood.”

_“Attention, I need all police units on Hanbury, I repeat, there have been approximately 20 casualties and climbing—”_

Her eyes snap wide open.

Twenty.

Twenty and _counting—_

“Lauren!” shouts March from the front of the IU office. “You’re—”

“I’m coming, I’m coming!” she shouts back hoarsely, jamming on her cap and coat. “We’re out of time, we’re too late— _”_

“The police will handle the Hyacinth’s victims. Our goal is to investigate.” March stops her in her tracks, squeezing her shoulders as she shakes in place, quivering with fear. “Lauren, listen to me. Calm down. Panicking isn’t going to do you any good—”

_“Get out of my way!”_

She runs all the way to the car, lungs windless. When she claims shotgun, the rest of the unit piling in behind her, including March, she has nothing better to do than to slump forward in her seat, hands tightening around the seats as Cooper drives down the 11th precinct, nails biting into her skin. It’s back again - that feeling. The feeling of air being sucked out of her windpipe. She can’t breathe. She is in the midst of another fire, with a brown cap lying in front of her. She is at a funeral pyre, watching her parents’ bodies being buried six feet under.

When they arrive on the scene, she nearly passes out.

There is blood everywhere —

And suddenly there is nothing but black night in front of her eyes.

* * *

It’s a newsboy who happens upon the scene first. He’s so horrified that he falls off of his bike and leaves it there in the street, the spokes of the wheels still ticking and spinning. Pandemonium unfolds shortly after that. Spectators close in like swirling sharks, elbowing through the growing crowd, licking their chops at the prospect of catching a glimpse of the Purple Hyacinth’s latest atrocity. When the police arrive on the scene, it’s not in a blaze of swirling sirens and barking orders but slack jaws and aghast, fitful glances, as though searching elsewhere for the authority they’re meant to be providing. He watches from an alleyway like a depraved voyeur, tethered to the scene of his own crime. He knows that he must leave. He _knows_ this.

But then he sees her.

She stands in front of the alleyway with her back to him, her frail shoulders pitched forward, as though standing on the edge of a diving board. She’s just a silhouette against all of that yolky light, but he registers the details with perfect salience: A brown flat cap pulled over her hair, a maroon jacket flapping listlessly in the bitter wind.

And it’s impossible, the way he knows her, then. He knows her prehistorically. He knows her in the way that the sky knows the imprint of a star after it has already withered to cosmic dust, in the way that atoms know one another after the thing they used to be ceases to exist. _I know you, I know you, I know you._

Kieran slings an arm around the girl's waist and pulls her flush against his chest, hard enough that it knocks the wind out of her, a ragged little gasp he’s pretty sure he’ll feel in the next life, and all the ones after that.His other hand covers her eyes, and he feels the flutter of her eyelashes against the inside of his palm, a subtle little touch like the beat of a butterfly’s wings.

When he speaks, it’s directly against the shell of her ear, low enough not to be heard over the commotion. They are poised in the eye of the hurricane, paradoxically still.

“Don’t look,” he murmurs.

He spins her into the alley and then it’s just the two of them, cold wind at his back and a warm, fickle thing in front of him, twitching in his arms like a flightless bird. He doesn’t miss the way that she relaxes into him first, as though acting on instinct, curved neatly into his chest like a pair of quotation marks. It’s a fragile little moment, as transient as a cloud passing over the sun.

But then it’s over. Her hands fly up to cover his, clawing at his fingers.

“I wouldn’t try that,” he advises quietly. “I have excellent grip strength.”

She exhales a petulant sigh and he feels it drift over his skin like a physical touch. “Who are you?”

 _Your worst nightmare. Someone who has no business holding you like this._ “It doesn’t matter,” Kieran replies. “You need to get out of here.”

“But—”

“It’s horrible,” he adds pleadingly, his voice softer now. “Awful.” He doesn’t add that he can’t bear the thought of being the cause of something she recalls in her nightmares, gasping into wakefulness in a nest of soaked bedsheets, the memory of the smell of blood and rot thick in her throat.

Kieran feels her shiver against his chest, considering his words. “I’m a detective,” she adds wanly, her voice nearly lost beneath the howling wind. “I’ve seen worse. You have to let me go—”

He chuckles humorlessly against her ear. “You haven’t, darling. You haven’t.” The words taste acrid in his mouth. When she shivers again, he drifts the hand at her waist up and down the side of her ribcage, warming her through the thin fabric. “You need a warmer coat,” he muses. It’s a somewhat ridiculous thought, in the midst of everything.

“Let me go,” she pleads. She twists again, a little more halfheartedly than before.

“If I do,” he says slowly, “I need you to leave. Go home—”

“I told you,” she interjects. Her voice is haughty and a little petulant and it’s so endearing it nearly short-circuits his brain. “I’m a _detective_. I need to investigate the scene.”

 _You won’t find anything._ Reluctantly, Kieran drops the hand at her waist. It feels cold, empty. It dawns on him, then, how ridiculous he’s being. How selfish.

“Alright. I’ll let you go.”

She huffs, somewhat breathlessly. “Thank you for your permission.” He can nearly feel her eye roll beneath his palm.

“But—” He adds.

“Now what?” She snarks.

He sighs, flexing his taut jaw. “When you walk back out there, don’t turn around.”

“I—”

“ _Please_ ,” he breathes. “Please, listen to me. I need you to do this for me before I let you go.”

She's silent for a long moment, considering his demand. Then, she nods.

“Okay,” Kieran murmurs. Slowly, he spins her around so that she's facing the front of the alley. The prospect of watching her go is torturous, so he shifts his gaze to his feet, still specked with drops of dried blood.

When he finally releases her from his grip, she doesn’t turn around. For a moment, he wonders if she might — She hesitates, her head bowed toward the pavement, pale hands flexed into fists. “Who are you?”

When he doesn’t reply, she merely shakes her head, as though resetting herself. And then she leaves, the hem of her maroon jacket waving in the bitter wind like a flag of surrender.

* * *

She stumbles into Sinclair Manor with the scent of tainted wood and spice in her lungs.

The entire IU could tell she wasn’t on her usual game, and it showed in their disappointed faces when she looked at March with blank eyes and didn’t respond to his numerous questions about what the hell went down on Hanbury. As soon as it became apparent she was a useless witness and didn’t gather any information on her _target - her case -_ he sent her back home.

She can’t bother to be upset about his anger at her - she’s too busy thinking about the stranger in the alleyway who had told her not to look with all the softness in the world. Tall, male, about her age. Lauren can discern this much. Why he was by a crime scene she has no idea. Why he _knew_ about the scene she doesn’t know.

But something - something in his _voice--_

_Don’t look._

Not _stay away, I can’t let you, I don’t want you to, I would rather._

It makes her shiver, the heat in her chest cracking as she slams the ornate door shut, back banging against wood. Lauren clutches at her shirt, hair spilling over her shoulders.

She’s always shoved away everyone who’s ever cared about her.

No one has ever seen the sharp and tainted edges of her and told her that they are the same with just a husky breath over the shell of her ear, a promise, and the scent of cologne in the air.

And when he touched her, it was like flying and drowning at the same time.

_I need—_

_I hate—_

“Lauren!” Tristan exclaims as she walks unsteadily into the foyer, near the dining room. She feels a brief stab of guilt as he embraces her tightly, the worry clear in his face. “I heard about Hanbury Street. Are you alright?”

 **“I’m fine,”** she says, and the words crumble to ash on her tongue. “They just told me to leave early. Could I at least wash up first?”

“If you’re sure—”

“I’m sure.”

“Hey.” He tips her chin up. “Ren, you know you can talk to me about whatever, don’t you?”

“I do,” she murmurs, nodding blithely. “Can I please go upstairs now?”

“If you insist. Rest well,” he says, but not without a concerned undertone in his voice as she practically writhes out of his gentle grip, taking the stairs two at a time.

The thing is, it doesn’t matter if he told her not to look, and she was spared the worst of a red canvas. What matters is that she failed. She has failed again, and again, and again, after swearing to the heavens that she will not. Another number of bodies to add to her bloody murder count. More lives she cannot save. More lives she cannot spare.

More lives she regrets with crimson staining her hands.

She only realizes that she’s started to cry the second the door to her bedroom closes, and that’s when Lauren allows the walls to be filled with a cacophony of wails, echoing around the wooden beams like some twisted siren song as she collapses to her feet, hands over her eyes, mourning a decade’s worth of loss and regret that she will never, ever be able to compensate for.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, this is result of me slipping shamelessly into Luna's DMs (Actually, her AO3 comments - this was prior to me dragging her back into the Discord) with the little thread of an idea for a dual perspective AU. Writing Astra Inclinant has been the most iterative and collaborative process that either of us have embarked on as writers. We are so beyond excited to share the rest with you. 
> 
> Also, we accept full responsibility for any and all tears that we may cause after this point. 
> 
> With love, and until part two,
> 
> -Your humble duo, Rabbit (Writing Kieran) and Luna (Writing Lauren) ❤️


	2. Sed Non Obligant

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We went a little overboard. So:
> 
> Stop times are recommended for this 21k chapter. If you wish to preserve the original pacing: stop at approximately XX26 MARCH, and the beginning of XX27.
> 
> And for the record...sorry.

**XX24**

**NEW YEAR’S EVE**

“Diagnostic negative,” the psychiatrist confirms.

“Must I really--”

“Yes, you must be here, because after going through an intense bout of trauma, you’d be surprised at how the APD’s strongest-minded officers and detectives snap. Stress disorders develop. Panic attacks are more common than you think in younger, inexperienced recruits. And in older ones who become accustomed to bloodshed, post-traumatic stress and worse is possible. I promise you, Detective Sinclair, that none of my current patients are hypochondriacs.” She looks down at Lauren, tipping her chin up to meet her eyes. “Does that answer your question?”

“Yes,” she says, but with less venom.

“Good girl. Then I’m ordering you not to overwork yourself or even remotely touch Hanbury for two months. You will continue with your own case and not interfere with others’ cases. Is that understood? And you can work from the IU base,” she says, shutting Lauren up the second she protests. “All the materials you need will be provided for you. You were one of the first units on Hanbury. You will not venture out to risky places. An assistant will. Even though you’re in currently somewhat stable condition mentally and physically, that could change.”

“Understood, doctor.” She shakes her head as the door to the office swings open. “I’ll try not to misbehave.”

“Take care of yourself, Sinclair,” is all the psychiatrist says as Lauren grabs her coat, venturing out of the doctor’s office. The IU is muted today, rain pelting down on the windows.

“You’re discharged?”

“I’m clear. The others are, too. We can begin work again. You?”

“Don’t worry about me, Lauren,” March says, smiling fondly down at her. It’s easy to believe he’s only a worried older co-worker in times like these. “Hanbury took a toll on all of us. We haven’t been able to function for weeks. But yes, I have been cleared to lead the unit. And you may continue your work on the Hyacinth case, I’m told?”

“Yes. I won’t waste a single second.”

“Well, don’t work too hard,” he jokes, laughing a bit. “It’s almost the New Year, Lauren. Your uncle’s hosting his annual party.”

“I won’t!” she throws back, grinning a bit as he leaves.

Her smile fades a bit as she begins walking back to her part of the office. The board is still where she left it. So are the dozens of charcoal drawings people have done of the Purple Hyacinth.

 _“People like him are disgusting,”_ she’d snapped, the doctor looking up. _“It doesn’t matter if some of them are lured in. They still join out of free will.”_

The sessions had been more of a vent than anything.

And yet, back here again, she doubts.

_Do they? And yet you still keep thinking about the man with a flower in his hand, and stare at the curve of his jaw. Do you hate something so beautiful and terrible, or are you fascinated by it because it is terrible?_

_Do_ you _love being terrible?_

She shoves down her hesitation and rips off the first picture.

* * *

“This year will be the best one yet.”

It’s far too late for a child to be out at such an hour, particularly on New Year’s Eve. Truthfully, Kieran has no business being here, either; alcohol-induced debauchery and excessive merriment has never held any real appeal on any other day of the year.

Kieran blinks down at the boy’s face, a dirty, pale little sphere in the moonlight. It’s difficult to immediately place his age, as malnourished as he is, though Kieran supposes he can’t be older than ten or eleven. He’s wearing a tattered jacket and a gap-toothed grin, evidently either ignorant or apathetic to his situation. “Is that so?”

The boy nods. “Tomorrow will be the twenty-fifth year of the century. That’s what they call a …” The boy draws his lip between his teeth in concentration. “A quad…ran…scen…tennial!”

“That’s a big word,” Kieran replies admiringly. He bends to his knee, studying the boy with his head tilted. “What makes it so special?”

The boy’s scrawny face pinches in contemplation. “Well, twenty five is my favorite number.” His chin tips forward proudly. “So, that means that this will be a very special year.”

Kieran chuckles, shrugging his coat off. “I hope you’re right, then.” When he slings the coat around the boy’s shoulders, it’s comically oversized, pooling around the jutting edges of his skinny joints and dragging on the pavement like a bridal train. “For both of our sakes.”

The boy’s eyes widen to saucers as Kieran fastens the buttons together and then tips the collar up against the bitter wind. “Wow,” he breathes, the word curling a puff of fog into the night. “Thank you, sir.”

Kieran stands and dusts off his kneecaps. “Think nothing of it.”

He turns to leave and then hesitates, glancing over his shoulder at Kieran, his sallow cheeks dimpled with a beam. “I think this year is very lucky already.”

* * *

**XX25**

**FEBRUARY**

“I see why you were my most promising recruit,” March comments, once Lauren steps back from the board.

“Don’t push it,” she teases, rolling her eyes as both of them sit at the edge of her desk, inspecting the investigation board in her private office. “But yes, I believe Thompson may be a lead. After nearly one and a half months of nothing.”

What she doesn’t add is _I could’ve found a lead faster if you weren’t hovering over my shoulder like a hawk._

_If you didn’t insist on monitoring my case firsthand, I could go further than this._

_I know I could._

Lauren merely turns a pen over in her hands, walking over to the board. She pulls lightly at a snippet of red string, the pen nub dotting it with ink. “He had connections to one of Angoisse’s mutual friends. Who also happened to be in cahoots with the Phantom Scythe. The closer they are to the inner circles, the more likely they’ll have information on the Purple Hyacinth. I can’t approach him as a detective, though.”

“That would be none the wiser,” March agrees. “There must be some meeting place you can locate with the IU’s map.”

“Wherever they go, it’s not going to be an old haunt.”

“You’d be surprised.”

“People like him value surprise.” She looks down. “I could go out and--”

“Are you sure fieldwork without an assistant would go over well?”

“You don’t need to worry.”

“I’d still recommend an assistant,” March insists. Lauren meets his gaze, and recognizes the look in his eyes. Wariness. Just because she wasn’t on top of her game during Hansbury. Had gotten distracted, and hadn’t collected what they needed. But if she’d have bothered to look closer, there would be concern. Real and true. “It would be useful.”

An idea flickers in the recesses of her mind.

_No. No, just because they’re cautious with me--_

It could work.

_I’m not going that far. I’m not that desperate._

But she is.

It’s been months and she hasn’t made any real progress. And Thompson could lead into another dead end. For all she knows, the IU could close her case if she fails to find enough information in time for an arrest. Their prodigy has to solve this one. She _has to._

“I know someone who could gather information,” she says quietly. The emotion in March’s eyes dims, and he nods. “I’ll get in touch with them soon.”

* * *

He’s ashamed to admit that the work begins to feel the same to him, after a while. _Work_ is, of course, a misnomer. The Scythe has no qualms with thinking of it as such — a series of business transactions that happen to include murder in the ledger. But for all of Kieran’s self-loathing, the truth of the matter is that he knows that he can only be exposed to the same wretched thing so many times before becoming numb to it.

And yet, he is not so numb as to miss the noise.

Kieran freezes like a bloodhound on a scent, ears perked in the direction of the offending noise. It’s an inconsistency not unlike a discordant key in a composition. He can’t immediately place its source, but it surfaces above the ambient din with the clarity of a bell tone, perfectly resonant despite the subtlety of its pitch.

He crouches, flanked on either side by rooftops that loom over his head like crooked teeth in the sallow light of the moon. It’s because of his elevated vantage point that he spots her walking with her head bowed and her hands pressed into her coat pockets, navigating the neural pathways of backstreetsfar below as confidently as though she were one of the Scythe’s own.

The girl is no criminal, though. She’s a detective.

Kieran drops off of the roof with no pretense for subtlety. Perplexingly, he has the immediate sense that she meant to find him here. He stands behind her, just as he did on the day that they met, though her posture reads more self-assured than it did at Hanbury. Her shoulders are thrown back slightly, her spine ramrod-straight. His suspicion is confirmed when she doesn’t startle at the sound of his entrance; she simply freezes, the toe of her boot still poised mid-step. She lowers it to the ground slowly.

“We seem to have a habit of meeting in alleyways, detective,” he notes blithely. “Bit late for an evening stroll, isn’t it?”

The girl tilts her capped head. “It’s you,” she says. Her tone is curiously impassive, as though they’ve happened to run into each other while out running errands. “I thought I’d find you here.”

He edges a brow into his hairline, reluctantly impressed. “And why might that be?” 

“I had a feeling,” she replies, a lilt in her voice. Perhaps he’s misinterpreting her tone, but he swears she sounds a little smug.

Kieran hums teasingly. “So it was a _feeling_ that led you here. Is wandering around alleyways at a quarter to midnight included in the job description, or is that merely an occupational hazard?”

“Neither,” she huffs, and now he _knows_ that she’s smug. “And I wasn’t wandering. It’s called deductive reasoning. I simply traced a radius around the areas where I assumed you’d most likely be, and then worked my way inward.”

Kieran can’t help but laugh. He finds himself wishing he could see what her face looks like. He wants to confirm whether her nose crinkles a bit when she’s being haughty in the way he imagines it does.

“What?” she grouses.

He taps his chin with his pointer finger. “Alright, detective. I’ll bite. What can I do for you?”

The fabric of her jacket ripples like spilled merlot as she crosses her arms over her chest. “I know that you know more than you let on at Hanbury,” she replies to the brick wall. Her tone is quiet, but firm with conviction.

Kieran stills. He opens his mouth to reply and then snaps it shut once more, fearing what he might say. A nearby rain gutter drips dirty sludge into the alley in a rhythmic metronome, and he counts seven ticks before she continues.

“I’ll take your silence to mean that I’m correct,” she says. “But we can’t discuss this here.” The top of her brown flat cap tilts down. “Come closer.”

“What?”

“I need your hand.”

He tells himself that he should probably reply with some quip about her boldness, something about asking him to dinner first, but the joke evades him. “Why?”

“Just come closer,” she intones, somewhat impatiently. The toe of her boot carves an aimless divot in the slush on the pavement.

Obediently, Kieran steps forward until his chin is nearly level with the cap of her shoulder. She smells like bittersweet tang, citrus and something sharp, like gunpowder. Life and death.

“Don’t—”

“I know,” she replies. “I won’t. Give me your hand.” When Kieran complies, she takes his wrist in hers delicately and unfolds his fingers. The tip of her index finger swirls around the circle of his palm for a moment.

He pulls a breath through his clenched jaw, so unmoored by her proximity, the feel of her skin against his, that he very nearly misses the pattern in her movements. Five taps, then a dash, a horizontal line that traces the path of his heart line. A tap, four dashes. Five taps, five dashes. When she’s finished, she drops his palm, but she doesn’t immediately step away from him.

Kieran blinks down at his palm as though he’s been branded by her touch. _Coordinates._

* * *

51.50.0.12.

She’s waiting against the glass window of an abandoned house, feet tapping against the squeaky floorboards. It’s a rather fearsome place for a midnight rendezvous, but it’s the safest option as of late. Her own house would be too risky - and besides, she suspects the man in the alleyway wants a semblance of privacy.

51.50.0.12.

Those are the coordinates for their meeting place she’d tapped onto his hand as he’d let her go. And from the intake of breath she felt by her cheek, she knew he’d gotten the message.

_Tomorrow at midnight._

And as if on cue, a shadow flits down from the rooftops.

* * *

Kieran tells himself that he’s indulging her curiosity for his own benefit. After all, staying close to her investigation offers him insight into the APD’s leads. Evidently, she suspects that he has connections to the Phantom Scythe, though she hasn’t placed just how _closely_ he was involved with Hanbury. At least, he can only presume that any sensible person aware of his identity wouldn’t jump at the opportunity to coordinate midnight rendezvous in abandoned buildings with him.

Then again, he’s grown to learn that his detective is hardly sensible.

“You’re late,” she says. Her toe is tapping a steady rhythm in the scuffed floorboards. It’s all rotten wood and dust motes in here, a thick, cloying combination that he tastes more than he smells.

“Not the place I would have chosen for a first date,” he comments musingly. She’s leaning against an exposed pillar with her back to him, though he can just trace out the curve of her shoulder and the jutting point of her hip in the sparse moonlight. “And I’m hardly _late_.”

“At any rate,” she replies tersely, “Now that we’re here, I expect you to explain yourself.”

Kieran guffaws, taken aback by her brusque tone. “Explain myself?”

“I didn’t call you here so that we could chit-chat,” she snaps. “Your presence at the scene at Hanbury wasn’t coincidental,” she adds factually. “The traipsing around on rooftops and late night walks don’t exactly help your case, either. So, what are you? Some kind of crime-stopping vigilante?”

A mirthless grin twitches at the edges of his lips. “No.”

“Care to elaborate?”

“No.”

Kieran pops his hip against the opposite side of the pillar that she’s leaning against, considering her questions. “You’re full of assertions, aren’t you,” he murmurs. “What else have you gathered?”

“You tell me,” she replies sagely.

“And ruin the mystery? We’re just getting to know one another, darling. I was expecting I’d have more time for ice breakers before we get into the nitty-gritty.” He pauses. “What’s your favorite color?”

She sucks in a breath through her teeth. “As though I’d willingly give you personal information.”

“Mine is green, in case you were wondering.”

“I wasn’t.”

He rolls his eyes at her petulance.“Alright, detective. I’ll cut you a deal, if only because I like you. You’re not incorrect in your assertion that I know some information about the Phantom Scythe. I won’t be able to meet with you regularly, but…” Kieran trails off with a thoughtful hum. “I’ll write you.”

“Letters?” She replies apprehensively.

“That’s the idea, unless you’d prefer sonnets. We’ll coordinate a drop-off location.”

“And?” she asks, at last.

“And?”

“What’s in it for you?”

Kieran runs his hand over his jaw contemplatively. “Your company.”

“My company?” She scoffs.“You can’t be serious—”

“Serious as a heart attack,” he quips. “I’ve always wanted a pen pal. Perhaps we can even make friendship bracelets.”

She doesn’t laugh at the joke. “Fine,” she mutters after a moment’s pause. “It’s a deal.”

 _A deal._ She sighs the word as though it’s a concession, and perhaps it is. Kieran supposes he should have turned back long ago, but he is nothing if not a selfish creature, careening towards the killing thing. “Give me your hand.”

She extends it behind her back, palm up, and he swiftly taps the coordinates over the surface of her skin. Her hand is powder-soft and alabaster in the low light, a far cry from the craggy texture of his callused fingertips.

He hears her light footfalls as she makes to leave through the back door. “There is one last thing,” Kieran adds. “I need something to call you. It would be rather rude of me not to address you in my letters, after all.”

The girl hesitates, contemplating this.

“Noire,” she says eventually, and Kieran can hear the smile in her voice.

“Blanc,” he tosses back. It’s an automatic response, and only later does he realize he has given her a piece of him first.

_White._

* * *

**XX25**

**LATE FEBRUARY**

A knock on her door snaps her out of her trance. A detective is hovering by the open doorway, clearly nervous. She swivels around in her chair, tearing her attention from the board. The new information she’s given the IU should satiate them, so why--

“--you have a minute, Sinclair?” he blurts out, snapping his mouth shut. Lauren only realizes she’s zoned out when she blinks twice.

“Oh. Yes. Is something the matter?”

He looks even more uncomfortable at the question. “It’s March. He wants to talk to you.”

Lauren clenches her jaw. It takes all her willpower not to storm out of there and confront her boss head-on. “I know he’s told you the message. So just tell me what the issue is.”

The detective across from her looks down.

“You’ve been taken off the Purple Hyacinth’s case.”

She doesn’t register the words at first. They filter through her mind mutely, at first. Denial comes not long after. They couldn’t have possibly - she was doing good work, why didn’t they trust her? Just because she didn’t follow their rules?

 _Hyacinth._ She tries the word out in her mouth and hates it. She hates the shape of it. She hates it. _Hyacinth._

No one else hated him like her.

And they took him away from her.

“I’m going to speak to him,” she exclaims, and before the other detective can say anything, she dashes out of her chair towards March’s office. He’s been expecting her, it seems.

“You--”

“We’ve assigned Veturia to close the Hyacinth case,” March says slowly.

She doesn’t care. She doesn’t care about it at all.

“That was my case,” she bites out. “It was mine.”

_You were supposed to be mine._

“Calm down, Lauren. It’s nothing personal. It’s just that...complications have arisen. And no, they’re not any of your concern. My goal is to keep my recruits safe,” he insists, and she closes her mouth. “For now, you’ll assist on related cases. We’ll find an individual case for you yet.”

Right now, she feels quite like she’d like to throw something across the room, but settles for angrily turning on her heel and leaving. Before she does, though, she looks back at him with glazed-over eyes.

“What did I do wrong?” she asks quietly, so quietly that only he can hear.

He isn’t her friend, she knows.

“Nothing,” March says at last. “Nothing, Detective.”

* * *

His birthday arrives without fanfare.

Kieran blinks into wakefulness and spends a moment staring blankly at his ceiling, trying to recall his age. Twenty two, he realizes, after a moment’s pause. His memories are all gummy and insubstantial, melding together somewhere in the far recesses of his skull. There are slippery glimpses of the time before, fleeting vignettes that weave through his consciousness like eels, always too evasive to grasp. A palm rousing him from sleep, fingertips weaving deftly over his scalp, a kiss against his cheek.

Kieran pads to his drawing room and sinks into his desk, drumming his fingertips against the wood grain for a moment. He supposes it’s as good a day as any to write her, though he hasn’t a clue how to begin.

_Noire,_ he writes, his pen curving comfortably around the shape.

_I have to admit, I’m somewhat surprised that you agreed to our little communiqué. As I told you, I’ve never had a penpal before, so you’ll have to excuse my brevity. I’m still getting the hang of this. I’m sure that you have dozens of burning questions, some of which I may not be able to answer, candidly speaking. You’re free to ask them anyway, not that you need any encouragement._

_To start, though, I’d like to know something about you. You can’t deny my request, because it’s my birthday, which means that doing so would just be cruel. See, I’ve already given you a fun fact about myself._

_-Blanc_

* * *

They’ve agreed on coordinates. 10.34.56.86: St. Lawrence Bridge. Ardhalis’s little secret, a dainty, delicately carved thing hovering over the river. She has a pseudonym and he has his. He will give her information, she just has to keep him company.

It’s a deal, plain and simple.

So _why_ doesn’t she know what the hell to _write?!_

Now that she’s off the case—

Lauren nearly chews the pen down the nub before she gets down a couple words.

_I am not an awkward schoolgirl. Idiot. Write!_

_Dear—_

No, that’s too informal.

_Sir—_

“Idiot,” Lauren curses under her breath.

_Forgive my language, but I’m not exactly sure what you desire or what you want._

_Actually, I’m not sure why you would trust me or why I would trust you. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and I’m willing to take a chance. If you betray me, I will know. I’m a detective. I can trace your linguistic signature. Don’t doubt me._

_I’m looking for those who have close contact with the inner circle of the Phantom Scythe. You say you know them somewhat; I’m sorry to poke that bear, but I must. I need to know if there is anyone you suspect who has some connection to the inner circles of the Scythe. Anyone in the merchant business, perhaps?Assassins - namely the Purple Hyacinth - target those most often. Someone from the IU is looking into him. I’m merely on the lookout for other leads._

_And...despite your request, I will not be tricked into divulging information about myself. Or at least, things you should know._

She taps the pen to her forehead. She has to give him something.

_But I will give you this._

_I like sunsets the best. When the sun is curving over the horizon, I have a perfect view of it from where I live. It lights up the entire city in pink and yellow and orange. It calms me. I rarely get any time to myself these days. It’s peaceful, to just watch everything settle into the ocean and watch the sky darken._

_-Noire_

* * *

She’s scrawled _Blanc_ on the front of the envelope. Her penmanship is neat and tight and practiced, exactly the type he’d have expected her to have. Kieran is tempted to open it on the bridge, but he waits until he’s crossed the threshold of his apartment to pluck the cream letterhead from the fold.

Noire doesn’t wax poetic in her writing, not that he’d have expected her to. She writes the way she speaks, earnestly and simply, favoring bold strokes and straight lines. He traces his thumb over the dips in the places where she pressed her pen too hard into the paper, little inky divots like scattered constellations, and feels unreasonably close to her.

_Noire,_

_Your first question, while blunt, is not unreasonable. I don’t desire anything nefarious in asking for your company, if that’s what you’re asking. I can also assure you that I hardly know what I desire myself; I doubt that you’ll find this response reassuring, but it’s all I’m able to offer at the moment. As for your threat, I don’t doubt its sincerity. While we’re at it, what’s a linguistic signature?_

_I’m afraid I don’t know anyone upfront, though I do know one thing. The Purple Hyacinth operates alone, though I’m sure you’ve uncovered as much in your investigations. I’ve gathered that the Phantom Scythe operates in concentric circles, with the outermost being the least informed. I suspect that there are few who know who or when he plans to strike — information like this is reserved only for those who are privy._

Kieran drifts his eyes shut for a moment, then reopens them.

_He is inhuman, and while I trust that your coworkers are being safe in their investigation, you should remember that you’re dealing with a murderer with a capacity for unfathomable cruelty. Applying logic or reason to his movements is fruitless._

_I’m very pleased to know that I’ve charmed you into divulging something about yourself. You seem to be getting the hang of this ice breaker thing already. I like sunsets, too. It’s the only time I seem to be able to stop thinking. If you ever find yourself at St. Lawrence bridge at dusk, the reflection of the light against the shore makes you feel like you’re standing in the middle of a mosaic._

_-Blanc_

* * *

**XX25**

**MAY**

She’s looking through the archives, half-paying attention to the information she’s looking for and half-thinking about the letters she’s been receiving in response to her own, when her life is changed forever.

The neighboring APD building’s selection of files is a mess, but it’s the best shot she has at finding dirt on cases. And Lauren is barely through a section labeled J-L when a slender, petite woman leaps out of the street under the open window barely a few feet away from her. Lauren can only stare in confusion, the file cracked open in her hand, as the woman crouches under the windowsill like some bridge troll before standing.

“What the--?”

 _“Ah!”_ the woman screeches, startling. She’s got a mole on her left cheek, Lauren notes. The detective in her keeps jotting down notes. About 5’4, with hazel eyes and dark hair. An officer. New recruit, by the look of it. “What are you doing here?!”

“...Says the person who just popped out a window,” she shoots back, cocking a brow up.

The sounds of footsteps grow louder, and the officer ducks back under the window, breathing heavily as the nearby patrol passes by at high speed.

“Running away from trouble?” Lauren drawls, cracking the file back open. She smirks internally. What a troublemaker. This girl can’t be more than a year younger than her, but she’s quite endearing to be around already. Like a ray of very intrusive sunlight.

“Always!” the officer exclaims breathlessly. “But, uh,” she says, tossing her a grin, “could you please not alert them?”

“Sure. You do you.” No use in reporting someone already going behind people’s backs when she has more secrets than she can count on both fingers. “I’ll be here for a while. These archives are a mess. I can’t find anything!”

“Oh, are you from the investigation unit?”

“Yup,” Lauren says, popping the _p_ at the end of it, smiling a bit as she hauls her coat over her shoulders. She can’t pinpoint why, but being around this girl makes her feel a bit lighter. Maybe it’s her eyes. They’re like an owl’s, intelligent and razor-sharp, but somehow also bright and inquisitive. “Lauren Sinclair. Got my detective badge a few months ago.”

She remembers what it was like - the high, in October. How the entire world had been handed to her on a plate.

And now it’s slipping.

_No. No, don’t think like that._

“Kym Ladell, patrol unit!” Kym chirps, saluting. “This is my first week. Though it may be my last,” she says, laughing nervously. “I just drowned Sergeant Hawkes’s paperwork in coffee. Again.”

Lauren sucks in an excited breath, smirking as she points a finger at her. “So _you’re_ the newbie Will’s always on about. I’ve heard _so much_ about you,” she teases, and a giggle escapes her lips.

It surprises even her. She hasn’t laughed like this in months. Years.

“Well, I - I’ve gotten a bit of a reputation, huh?”

“You think? Come on, he always says you’re the bane of his existence, but he’s _such_ a bad liar…”

* * *

_Noire,_ Kieran writes. Then, with a flourish, he adds underneath: _Dearest maiden of the night,_

_I have to admit that it’s somewhat amusing to picture you traipsing around the city under the cloak of nightfall. You’re certainly the most unconventional detective I’ve ever met. What was it that inspired you to pursue the career path?_

_I imagine that it has something to do with your conviction. You told me in your first letter that you’d find out if I betrayed you, and while I haven’t known you for very long, I suspect that very few who have crossed you have come out unscathed._

Kieran grins, recalling the little vignette she offered him in her last letter, a story of a sundress she would have worn every day, if only her parents would have let her. The details she offers about her life are fleeting, but they always arrive dazzling and unannounced, streaking through his periphery like comets.

_I suppose that I should offer you a memory in exchange for the one you shared. Thanks for that, by the way. I can’t stop picturing how adorable you must have looked in that yellow sundress. Inquiring minds would like to know whether you were missing one of your front teeth. I’m just trying to complete the mental image._

_I don’t remember much of my childhood. It was_

He hesitates, the tip of his pen still poised over the paper.

_lonely.I wish I had known you, then. Sometimes, I feel like I’ve known you for a long time._

_-Blanc_

* * *

**XX25**

**NOVEMBER**

_“For her feckless boy, she did weep and wail. Saying, Lord have mercy where did I fail? Out my belly, then pick up a gun. And fall for the Rose…”_

Old ballads from her father’s day can still be heard in the foyer. Tristan must’ve put on the phonograph this afternoon; the warbling voice of a singer can be heard all around the manor. He doesn’t do this often, but a part of her knows it’s to cheer her up.

Tomorrow is the eighth anniversary of Allendale.

When she was younger, her uncle would find her holed up in her room. He wasn’t able to find her at first, but when he pulled open a tightly-shut wardrobe, he’d find a little girl of about thirteen, then fourteen, then fifteen. She’d been sixteen when the memories stopped replaying themselves in her head: the fire, the blood, the screams.

“I’ve got you,” he would always murmur into her hair, as she sobbed. “I know, I miss them too.”

“It’s my fault,” Lauren would whine into his chest. “It’s my fault they’re dead, it’s my fault...”

“It’s not. Ren, it’s not. Trust me on this, sweetheart.”

What hurts is that they survived the fire, but didn’t survive a car crash.

The deaths that hurt the most are the ones that are hardly a blaze of glory.

When he opens the door to her room, he seems relieved that she’s seemingly okay, just hard at work on her fifth replacement case. “Everything alright?”

“It’s fine.” She casts him a wan smile. “Just thinking.”

“Well, the storms are coming soon. Set up the fire, won’t you?” Tristan says, and before she gets a chance to say anything, he loads a couple of logs into the hearth, lighting them up, poking at the embers with a poker until they blaze up. The heat greets her soon after.

“Thanks,” she admits shyly.

“Let me know if you need anything else!” Tristan says cheerily, waving as the door closes shut to her room. The smile stays on her face a bit longer than usual; any smile on her visage is rare these days. Rarer than any precious gemstone, rare to see at all, when her entire body is hidden behind enormous stacks of papers and countless files containing extensive research on her case. A candle burns low on her desk, but it pales in comparison to the now-blazing fire in the hearth. It shoots up a bit as a piece of firewood tumbles to the side, shooting up golden sparks.

But eventually, cold eclipses her heart, and any warmth left in it. Lauren doesn’t flinch as she grabs the still-hot poker and prods at the fire, sending up a flurry of ashes with each stroke until the flames are gone.

A fire birthed Lauren Sinclair, killed a child and raised a woman all on her own.

She doesn’t need comfort anymore. She’s not that girl she once was.

She doesn’t need it anymore.

A fire _is_ Lauren Sinclair, blackened and tormented and wicked around the edges.

New people have come into her life. But you cannot water a dead flower and expect it to grow.

That night, she silently slips out of the house like she always does. If she didn’t know better, she’d have thought the feeling in her chest was almost anticipation when she walked down to St. Lawrence to retrieve her letter. Almost relief. Almost longing.

_Dearest maiden of the night…_

She can’t help it.

She cups a hand over her mouth, flushing a bit.

* * *

“You can’t keep doing this forever,” Angoisse tells him around a mouthful of blood.

Kieran knows that he’s dreaming, of course. He’s back in the butcher’s shop, the tip of his blade poised driftingly over the man like a pendulum. Angoisse is crumpled beneath him, painted in sickly contrasts, pasty white and poison apple red.

“I know that,” Kieran replies. “How could I not?”

“What do you think is going to happen?” He rasps. “Do you think she’ll fall in love with you?” When Kieran doesn’t reply, he pushes himself to his knees and tilts his head. “Do you think you’ll run off into the sunset together?”

“You’re dead,” Kieran replies flatly.

“Am I?” He swipes the back of his palm across his stained lip. “How funny.”

Except he’s not, really. He’s alive in Kieran’s mind, a tumor leaching cancerous sink into his veins. As though Angoisse can hear his thoughts, he smiles crookedly. “An eye for an eye.”

“Who made you the judge?”

“Who made you the executioner?” Angoisse asks sweetly, bowing his head. “Be careful, Hyacinth. One wrong step and it might be her on her knees in front of your blade instead of me.”

When Kieran raises the hilt of his sword, it casts a long, jagged shadow like an inky scar over half of Angoisse’s grin. “Don’t speak of her,” he spits.

“I’m only looking out for you,” Angoisse replies, feigning hurt. He shrugs his frail shoulders. “You’re young and stupid.”

And then the nightmare ends as it always does, unceremoniously and horrifically, with Angoisse shooting himself before Kieran can finish the job. 

He awakens with the word on his lips. _Noire, noire, noire._ He says it aloud, as though conjuring her clean out of the darkness of his bedroom. Before he met her, he had reasoned that if his dreams were his reparations, he was more than happy to pay the price.

And then he traced the grooves that her pen carved into the parchment, tapped a coordinate into the palm of her hand, laughed at her impudence. Imagined her mouth under his and wondered whether she tasted the way she smelled, like blown-out birthday candles, all citrus and sweet smoke. 

Now, he pays a different kind of penance.

* * *

If she is fire, he is tinder.

It’s almost something out of a fairytale. Misplaced in a city that hurts anyone remotely gentle and ill-suited to pace the dark streets of Ardhalis. Gentle words and little snippets of their lives exchanged back and forth, formalities slipping into something between purely business and so incredibly longing and desperate.

Without a name, without her position, without her past, she is free.

As black and white, letters collected under the spill of moonlight transform them into something different. They’re just two strangers reaching out to someone as lonely as they are, wistfully communicating in strokes of ink that might as well be lingering touches across the curve of their jaw, a gentle breath over their forehead. They are no longer strangers. They are something else.

It becomes personal.

 _You infuriate me,_ she admits in one letter, holing up in her office when she chooses to write during the daytime. _I can’t understand what you want._

_Maybe I don’t want anything._

_Everyone wants something._

_Perhaps. But I’m not in the business of demanding more than I deserve, darling._

_You make it sound like you don’t deserve much,_ she comments on the tenth.

His reply is a lengthy one, but ends in a single word that rips her breath away.

 _Some people don’t,_ he admits.

_I know what that’s like. I think for years, now, I’ve been alone. Out of choice._

_You don’t have to be alone._

_Neither do you, White._

It’s foolish. It’s stupid, and it’s dumb, and it’s idiotic, selling her soul to a stranger. But he gets her. He does, and when they hole themselves up in a little bubble of ink and words, the rest of the world seems to fall away.

She doesn’t have much time to date. But this certainly does feel...like _something._

It scares her.

It scares her so, so much - the idea of being known, inside and out.

So she waits. Waits with her heart pounding inside her chest at midnight on St. Lawrence - because this is when he’s supposed to pick up her letter - and waits. Lauren looks down at the waters below, a thousand and one thoughts swirling around her mind. Her world is close to tipping in her favor or otherwise; this, she knows. In stasis, unpredictable.

He isn’t.

Black. White.

Noire. Blanc.

_Do you want to keep doing this?_

And when the scent of wood and spice hits her, embraces her at the same time a pair of arms do, pulling her against a broad chest, she relaxes into it, raising her arm to caress his cheek. Both of them stare out into the snowy light, sharing the same expression unknowingly.

“Yes,” he whispers, and her heart nearly bursts.

 _I guess I do,_ she thinks, hardly daring to breathe. _I guess I do love you._

* * *

“I missed you,” she whispers.

He wishes desperately to see her face. It’s too dark to make out anything beyond the vague shape of her, but he can see the tapering point of her slender cheek, the slant of her jaw. Her chin is tilted forward, toward the blackened waters. She is as still as a marble statue save for the gentle cadence of her breath.

Kieran rests his chin on the top of her head. “I missed you, too.” He pauses. “Did you have a _feeling_ that you’d find me here?”

He feels her exhale, a puff of warm air through her half-parted lips. “Stop teasing me. I have excellent intuition—”

“I don’t doubt that for a second, _Noire.”_

For a long moment, there is only the gentle churn of the tide beating against the bridge, the muted, ambient din of life moving outside of them. He runs the tips of his fingers in a slow path up and down the curve of her arm like a harpist, drawing her further into the plane of his chest. “Tell me what you’re thinking,” he murmurs.

“I’m not thinking anything,” she replies.

“That,” he retorts dryly, “Is the biggest lie I’ve ever heard.” He taps the top of her head with his pointer finger. “I don’t think you ever _stop_ thinking.”

“Touché,” she mumbles, sounding uncharacteristically self-conscious. “I’m thinking that I wish that things were different.” Kieran drifts his fingertips behind her ear, smoothing a wayward lock of hair in place. “It’s stupid—”

“It isn’t stupid,” he interjects, his voice a little breathier than he’d intended. He’s considered it, of course. They’d be bandits on the run, flitting through cities like fickle seasons, never settling. He’d indulge her every whim and kiss her breathless in motel bars. She’d wear a dress that would move like running water against her hips and a name that wasn’t hers. _Noire_ and _Blanc_ , pseudonyms that would. speak more to who they were than the names they’d been given.

“I want that, too.”

“You do?”

He presses a kiss against the curve of her ear. “So much, you have no idea.”

* * *

**XX26**

**MARCH**

The beginning of the end starts like this:

A gang of men who had chosen to play poker in a bar with one Tim Sake end up dead underneath a bridge.

“Detective Cooper,” March announces, for the entire IU to hear, “you will be in charge of this case. Detective Sinclair will assist you.”

“Yes, sir,” he says resolutely.

She whirls around from where she and the forensics are inspecting the corpses, and seethes. Lauren doesn’t know it quite yet, but as she starts walking over to March, coat flapping furiously in the wind, the end has already started long before this.

“Let me handle his associates,” she breathes. She’s trembling with rage, and it takes all her might to hide it; make it seem like it’s merely spring wind and the stench of blood getting to her senses. “You said I’d be fit to work on another case alone.”

“I apologize, Sinclair, but--”

“Lauren.” She blurts out the word, and crosses her arms when he doesn’t reply immediately. “You used to call me Lauren.”

March only looks to the side in response.

She is the IU’s prodigy. She has been on more newspaper headlines than she can count.

 _Promising young woman takes down a nefarious criminal den,_ one had read.

See, here’s the thing. She could care less about the fame. To hell with the praise. But - but solving problems makes her. She is built for fixing. She is not meant to destroy. And yet, for two years now, with exceptions few and far, she has done nothing but break everything she touches.

“March--”

“I apologize for this,” he repeats. Gentler. But it does nothing to quell her rage. “If all goes well, another assignment may spring up in the coming months.”

He isn’t lying, and yet.

“Have it your way, then,” she says bitterly, turning to assist Cooper with the remaining bodies.

* * *

“You’re distracted,” Bella declares.

The observation brings her joy, but it isn’t immediately evident in her expression. It crests over her features slowly, like a developing sunrise.

They’re seated at the bar at one of the faceless, homogenous Scythe haunts; this one is far too loud and smells faintly of mildew in the way the underground taverns tend to. At the end of the day, they are, after all, just sewer rats playing dress-up.

Kieran takes a pull of his drink. It’s a little too sour for his taste. “That so?”

“You’re hardly in the mood to play tonight,” Bella murmurs thoughtfully, tapping her chin. “I wonder why that might be.”

“Call it self preservation.” Kieran swirls the ice cubes in his glass with his straw. “Only an idiot would go sticking their hand in a snake’s den for _fun_.”

“Seriously,” she replies, leaning forward on her elbows. He knows that he’s exhausted her patience to the quick. “What’s with you?”

He knows that she picks up on the way his jaw tenses at the question, because of course she does. Her gaze narrows on the spot as though it’s been branded with a hot iron. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“You insult me, Kieran.” Her fingers inch over her hip and tease the hilt of her dagger in one, two, three lazy circles. “I’ve made a career out of carving up liars.” She pauses, tilting her head, as though she’s caught a scent. “Would you like to know what I think?”

“Not particularly—”

“Humor me,” she purrs. “I think you’ve met someone. A sweet little lamb, perhaps—”

It feels something like a dream after that. He’s on her so quickly, caging her against the wall with his forearm crushed against her windpipe. A few patrons blink up from their drinks with a bored sort of curiosity, but no one acknowledges the spectacle. After all, such occurrences are commonplace here.

“Say that again,” he snarls.

Bella tips her head back against the wall and swipes her tongue simperingly over her ruby lip. “I see that I’m correct.”

“You don’t know anything,” Kieran replies through his teeth.

Bella sighs gustily, all feigned petulance.“I know a lot more than you do, as it turns out. So let me offer you some free advice, one old friend to another.” She lowers her blade and returns it to its scabbard it with slow purpose, glancing up when it’s fully sheathed. “Nothing you do goes unnoticed. It’s written all over your face.”

Kieran barks a mirthless laugh, lowering his forearm from her throat. “I’ve gotten this far without your _advice,_ Belladonna.”

“That may be so. But if you’d both like to keep your heads,” she purrs, turning to leave, “I’d advise you to be wary.”

* * *

“You need to be wary,” Tristan warns. She’s never seen him like this: hair askew, come to talk to her in the middle of the night. “Every night, Ren. Every night I see you pouring over this Sake case, the candlelight burning low. You’re not doing yourself any favors--”

“I told you, Uncle. I’ve got this.”

“The last time you obsessed over something like this was the Hyacinth case!” he erupts, gesturing. “And even then--”

He breaks off. Her eyes widen as he catches sight of what seems to be a small, rectangular window hidden by two twin white curtains. But as he makes his way towards it, she runs after him - and fails to prevent him from parting the curtains to reveal a private investigation board. At the center of it all lies Allendale.

“Still,” he breathes, in silent rage. “Still?”

“Uncle--”

“Take it down!” he demands, and she flinches. She’s never seen him this angry. “Take it down, Ren. _Now.”_

“You and I both know I can’t do that.”

“Why?!”

 _“You know I can’t!”_ she yells.

“I can’t watch you do this,” Tristan says, furiously tearing off his spectacles. “I can’t watch you lose yourself!”

 _What does it matter?_ Lauren swallows down a laugh. _I’ve already lost everything. There is nothing left for me but the agony of knowing I could’ve saved everything, but did not._

_And I already lost myself years ago._

“Sorry,” she says, bracing herself against his arm. “I’m sorry.”

He blinks down at her, suddenly regretful. Tristan pulls her into a tight hug, crushing her in his arms. “Please. Please, don’t do this again.”

“Sorry,” she repeats into his chest, a low murmur.

_I can’t._

_I can’t let go, ever._

* * *

When he goes to the bridge and finds that she hasn’t left him a letter where it should be, he returns to his apartment and paces the length of it in a restless circuit, turning over scenarios in his head.

 _Perhaps she’s bored of you,_ an oily, lecherous voice at the back of his skull murmurs. _Perhaps she’s learned that you’re nothing more than a fraud._

He scrubs his hand over his face and pads to his window, peering unseeingly at the sky as it dips into a patchwork sunset. He wonders if she’s looking out her own bedroom window, reveling in the only quiet moment she’s afforded in her day. It seems impossible, but he’s certain that he knows her face, if only from the glimpses he’s managed to steal like contraband. He swears that he can envision what she looks like while she watches the sunset, that sharp profile dimpled with a whisper of a grin, her lids drawn low. He imagines it softens her portrait like watercolor.

When Kieran finally writes his response, his penmanship is sloppier than usual, dipping below the lines as though compelled by gravity. He steels his trembling hand and tries again.

_I know that you’re as headstrong as they come, but I can_ ’ _t bear the thought of you getting hurt. I would’t forgive myself if I didn’t say it._

_And if I’m mentioning things that I wouldn’t forgive myself for not saying, I’d add that you’ve captured me from the moment I saw you, perhaps even longer than that. I’d add that I have the impossible sense that I knew the feel of your body against mine long before I ever touched you._

_I don’t know what that means. I find that I’m sure of very few things when it comes to you, though I’m unequivocally certain that I don’t want any of it to end._

_Be safe._

_-Blanc_

* * *

_I won’t be able to continue our daily communications for a while._

_I hope you understand. Things have...come up, and I won’t be able to write as often. I’m sorry. I’ll miss you, though. I really will. Just be careful, okay. Somehow, you have wormed your way into my brain, and because of that, I have a tendency to worry about you._

_-Noire_

* * *

_Somehow, you have wormed your way into my brain._

Kieran's response is one he never sends. Or, perhaps he does. Perhaps she is waiting for him at the other end of a thread or poised at the crest of a mountain, catching the words he only meant to whisper into the wind. Perhaps he speaks them to her in a different life, some sun-dappled place where he can look at her and never stop.

He finds a piece of sketch paper in his nightstand and scrawls it down with feverish, hurried penmanship. Creases it down the middle, then lengthwise, tucks it between a pair of tomes on his bookshelf.

_I think you’ve always lived in mine._

_-Blanc_

* * *

The scales tip against her favor one fateful afternoon.

She has failed to report on Sake’s associates properly. March will let her interrogate him today, but after that, she will go on temporary hiatus.

This does nothing but provoke Tristan Sinclair’s anger further. But he is like her in more ways than one. When he comes into the IU, he is more Chief of Police Sinclair than her uncle. When she stands between him and March, she is Detective Sinclair wrought by ruin, not Lauren Sinclair, girl borne of ash and grief.

“My niece has done nothing but be one of this unit’s hardest workers,” Tristan argues stiffly, meeting March head on. “If you deem her unfit for duty, surely there must be something very wrong here!”

“We don’t mean offense. To you, or - to you, Sinclair,” March says, breaking off as he meets Lauren’s eyes. Between the two men, both matched in their stony-eyed glances, she feels incredibly small, pressed between the weight of duty and something that might’ve been called fear. Perhaps legacy, even: standing between the head of her future and the last remnant of her past. She bites her lip, quelling her hands to unclench.

She can’t bear to look at the detective now.

He was once going to give her everything, and now, he wants to take everything from her.

No one really wanted her for what she was.

 _You Sinclairs operate like a den of foxes!_ Stefan Hawkes had erupted once at a family dinner. She’d been five, crawling on the table with knobbly knees and bearing toothy smiles at Will. She hadn’t understood the adult talk when it happened. Now she does. _You’re not the nobles you think you are. All you’ve crafted is a legacy borne on lies and half-truths. You go blazing with knives out and fist the hands that feed you. Your daughter will be the same as you, Alexander. Rachel. Mark my words._

Perhaps the Hawkes patriarch is right, after all.

Perhaps she is nothing but her father and mother’s daughter, and when she collapses, lets the ivy trellises of the garden consume her, she will be nothing but a loose canon, the cold metal of a gun barrel.

“I’m going down to the interrogation room,” she says silently. “I need a team of three.”

“We’ll provide one,” March says, gladly accepting the distraction from Tristan’s fury. “Cooper! Lead the way.”

The interrogation room has been sterilized, all cold white tile and marble floors. Tim Sake sits in the middle, across from an empty chair by a small table. Lauren tightens her bun before she enters, closing the metal door shut behind her.

She knows his name, but asks it anyway.

“Tim Sake, was it?” she says, voice raspy from earlier’s scuffle. “You’re one of the last people who saw Mr. Kevin Chow alive. Can you tell me what happened last night?”

When he speaks, it’s in a low murmur. The scarred man looks up at her, one eye containing an eerily light iris. “Nothing much, actually. We were playing at the Golden Clover and I went home straight after. The other players can confirm, and my neighbor saw me get home.”

“How long have you and Chow known each other?”

So far, so good.

She can do this.

“A couple of years. I used to work in his father’s mines before I got my start in the trade business.”

“Do you know if there was anyone who would want to hurt Chow?”

**“No.”**

She pauses writing, her pencil coming to an abrupt stop. She cannot keep running on adrenaline for long. She has to control herself.

“We found suspicious large sum transfers in his ledger,” she says slowly, visage darkening. “Do you know if he had any criminal associations?”

“No, he was an honest man. Those were probably his train investments.”

“Right, the trains. He’s been a big backer of railway development for the past twenty years...and _other projects_ started by the royal family. Was he ever concerned about being targeted by the Phantom Scythe? It’s public knowledge they go after supporters of the royal family.”

“He never brought it up. **I had now idea the Phantom Scythe could know who he was. Or would do this to him.”**

She nearly cracks the pencil in half.

“Indeed,” she mutters, teeth gritted tightly, “for no one outside the Phantom Scythe could know for sure.”

Lauren can’t hear the three men muttering outside the glass panel anyway, but she suspects they’re questioning her hesitation. She tightens her grip on the pencil, muttering a silent mantra in her head as Sake continues.

 _Let go,_ Dylan had asked.

 _Let go,_ Tristan had begged.

 _Don’t look,_ the only true love she’d ever known had whispered.

 **“It would be terrible to learn that my friend was one of their victims,”** he continues.

She can’t.

She will never.

The wood is breaking under her grip. The pain is a friend and welcome enemy. “Alright. You can stop lying now, Sake. How about you tell me what you did after you went home?”

 **“Nothing!”** he blusters. “You really think I could hurt Kevin?”

“The _second_ I mentioned the Phantom Scythe,” she snarls, “your breathing changed, your pupils dilated, and you stopped making eye contact. Now please,” she spits with all the venom in the world, _“stop lying._ Your game won’t work on _me.”_

**“But I’m not! I would never kill him, he was my friend! I have no connection to the Phantom Scythe!”**

Oh, he wants to play _games_ with her, does he? This little bastard wants to play a game of chess with her. She can do this. She can do this as long as she can slowly sink her teeth into his throat, rip the truth out of him with her jaws. The carnage would be lovely to see. The destruction would be lovely to see.

“Of course not! It’s terrifying, isn’t it? Insidious...they strike so suddenly. _Nobody is safe.”_

“Yes! Just like the Allendale Train Station tragedy. **No one could’ve known they would strike there. I, for one, was shocked.”**

The pencil snaps in half.

**“What a horrible, senseless, massacre.”**

* * *

Kieran can’t seem to stop writing her.

He worries, and he paces, and he finds a twisted, asinine sense of comfort in writing words that she’ll never read. Perhaps it emboldens him to put ink to the fundamental truths neither of them can bear to acknowledge by name. Truths that make him feel feverish and desperate and perpetually harried, as though he’s running out of time. He supposes that they are.

The unsent letters lay scattered around his apartment, tucked into the folds of his cold little life as though they washed up with the tide.

Scrawled on a piece of notebook paper, pressed into a loose corner of his kitchen windowpane:

_I don’t know how to return to the person I was before you._

_-Blanc_

* * *

The middle of the end goes like this:

A girl - or perhaps some call a mad woman not long after - snaps.

That’s what they say, at least. They don’t say _all those years of grief got to her at last._

They say instead _that girl’s gone mad._

The cracks in the glass are like spiderwebs. She feels his collar between her hands as she hauls Sake up to the double-paneled window, looking up at him with eyes that could’ve burnt holes in his own.

They are lifeless.

_“What did you say.”_

He’s choking. He can’t answer her. Her knuckles are forced against his windpipe. Still no answer. He grins down at her.

 _“I said stop lying, bastard,”_ she spits. _“You think we wouldn’t know you’re one of them?! How did you know they would target the train station, not the palace that day?! HOW?”_

“What the hell are you doing, Sinclair?!” erupts Cooper, frustration on his face as he and the two others break into the room. “Get off him!”

“No - _let go of me!”_ she shrieks, kicking as they yank her off him. It’s too late; they restrain her with their arms as Cooper holds her back, clearly disappointed in her. He looks at her like she’s a feral dog. How dare he. How _dare--_

“He’s part of the Phantom Scythe!”

“And what told you that?!” Cooper demands, the rest of his sentence drowned out by the verbal apology being given to Sake. Her heart sinks in her chest as a detective arrives at the door with information.

“Please,” Chow’s ex-wife begs, crying as they drag her past the room. “I swear I’m innocent--”

_She’s not the killer, she’s not, why--_

_She’s innocent, they just need to go to his house and see--_

_“Why won’t you listen to me?!”_ she screams, before the world goes black.

* * *

His second unsent letter is written in the margins of an old newspaper, tucked underneath a couch cushion like a misplaced coin.

_Do you believe in destiny?_

_I imagine that you’re far too practical. I can nearly picture the way you’d scoff if I were to ask you such a thing in person. You’d plant your palm on your hip and say, “Are you going to ask me if I believe in fairies, too?”_

_You’d remind me that your deductive reasoning led you to me, a series of concentric circles drifting inward, two points on an orbital path. But even sensible things contain infinite unknowns. I like to think that nestled somewhere within one of them is the star that inclined you to me._

_-Blanc_

* * *

_30.68.42.11._

_Please._

_I need you._

_-Noire_

* * *

Kieran isn’t sure what compels him to return to the bridge. Long after the fact, he’ll tell himself that he felt her reaching for him, fingertips outstretched over their gnawing divide. She’s nestled into the marrow of him, carved over the surface of his skin like a fingerprint, as fundamentally a part of him as the sinew and bone.

_I need you._

* * *

The bar is almost closing when he arrives. No one else is here except for her and the bartender, who leaves as soon as she says she doesn’t need another drink. An hour until closing time, he informs her.

She waves it off.

When sits next to her, he makes a strangled noise in the back of his throat. From what he can see, she’s lying with her head on the bartop, face hidden in her crossed arms. Her tie is slung loosely around her neck, and her auburn hair is disheveled, pooled on top of the countertop.

“You’re there?” she asks, muffled.

“I’m here,” he confirms. Slowly, he reaches out, touching her arm. “What’s wrong?”

“Everything,” she says, then laughs once she realizes it’s true. “Everything.” Lauren straightens back up, taking care to have her back to him as she downs the last of the amber liquid in her glass. “Pretty sure I’ve lost everything, too.”

“Look--”

“A criminal walks free today,” she snarls. “Per my request, they’ve agreed to have a hearing. Most likely he’ll lose.”

“Phantom Scythe?”

“What else?” she says, letting out another mirthless laugh. “I’ll make them pay,” she growls over her drink. “Every last one of them.”

The stranger next to her inhales sharply, almost as if he has just been placed under the whet of her knife, sharpened to a fine point by brimstone torn out of a well of pent-up grievance. But he does not leave. Perhaps he is just as fascinated by a mystery as she is. Perhaps danger calls to him as it does her. _You like nothing good for you._

“Will you tell me your name, then, stranger?” he asks finally, voice a bit strangled. “If I am to meet Ardhalis’s future savior on a night like this, I’d prefer to know her before she becomes famous.”

“You don’t need to know my name or know what I look like,” Lauren mutters. “You won’t do the same for me.”

He lets out a raspy laugh under his breath. “Fair enough, dear maiden.”

And maybe it would be better if he didn’t. Because to hear her name out of her own lips would be a curse. _Lauren._ Laurel leaves, weighted scales, balance, imbalance, tragedy. But in his mouth it would be wine-dark, wrought from iron, leaving her undone. _Lauren, Lauren, Lauren._

* * *

It’s all heady smoke and cracked leather and bitter whiskey in here, but she beams through the darkness like a beacon. She whispers something that he doesn’t catch and he leans in, his palm ghosting over the small of her back,brushing the jutting points of her spine. She moves against his touch as though toeing the line of sleep and wakefulness, drowsy and unhurried, compelled by something that lives just beyond conscious thought.

“I didn’t hear you,” Kieran says softly.

She picks her head up slightly, but she’s still looking down at the bar top. “Close your eyes.” The curtain of her hair is covering her face, its color difficult to discern through the darkness. Kieran supposes he could mix several hundred colors together and still never get it quite right. He complies, leaning back a little on his bar stool. “Alright.”

“Are they closed?”  
“Yes,” Kieran replies, grinning faintly. “Is this another ice breaker?”

He hears her move, but he doesn’t feel her until she’s right in front of him, her warm breath drifting over his face like a rising tide. She brings her palm up over his eyes and hovers it there for a moment.

“What are you doing?” Kieran asks, gently amused.

She sighs agitatedly. “So many questions.”

“Well, darling,” he drawls as he reaches for his hand. Her index finger circles his wrist, her thumb pressed against his pulse point. “You have to admit that this is slightly unconventional behavior.”

“I’m putting your hand over my eyes,” she replies impatiently. “Relax.”

“Relaxing around you is impossible,” Kieran replies factually.

“Well, _try,_ ” she grouses. He feels her lift his palm to cover her own eyes and then drops her hand. For a moment, they simply stand there.

“You’re very weird,” Kieran says fondly.

She scoffs in reply and leans in slightly, drifting her free hand over the curve of his jaw as confidently as though she’s done it a million times before. “And _you’re_ impatient.” Her fingers rove over the curling hair at the nape of his neck as though searching for something.

“What are you doing, you strange girl?”

When she leans forward and presses her lips against his, he almost doesn’t register her touch, at first. It’s a chaste peck, feather-light, drifting over his mouth like an exhale. There, and then not. She pulls away, but not so far that he doesn’t still feel her breath over his mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she breathes. “That was—”

Their second kiss is everything their first wasn’t. He moves on instinct, grasping for her waist with his free hand and crushing her mouth back against his. If he could figure out how to articulate the sound, he’d probably etch the little whimper she gives into his mouth onto his tombstone.

Kieran edges his tongue along the seam of her lips questioningly and she parts them in answer, allowing him to venture further into the supple folds of her mouth with a sigh of concession. He wants to taste her everywhere, but he takes his time, tracing gentle, unhurried paths over her tongue with his own. When he pulls away, it’s only so that he can shift his attention to the plane of skin at her throat, scraping his teeth over the fluttering tendon in her neck, tangling his hand in the hair at her nape. She hisses an inhale through her teeth as he swirls his tongue over the twitching point of her larynx, and it’s something baptismal, the feeling of her breathing under his mouth.

She arches further into him, gripping a handful of his jacket with her fist, and he knows what she means without her having to say it: _I need you closer than close. I need you written into me, burrowed underneath my skin._ They communicate not with words but with blind want,shades of meaning that live and die in the spaces between their mouths.

He knows that she’s ruined him for anyone else. There will never be another kiss like this. For as long as they’re both sharing air on the same dying rock in space, Kieran will never know anyone’s mouth like he knows hers now, cruel and wanton, fluttering under his like a heartbeat. He’ll die with the taste of her on his lips.

Kieran pulls back for air and she reprimands him with a nip at his lower lip and a haughty little growl that nearly brings him to his knees.

“Dear Gods.” He pants the words into the hollow of her throat, relishing the way that goosebumps rise on her skin in the places his mouth touches. The phrase is fitting, perhaps, being that kissing her is somehow simultaneously a religious experience and the filthiest thing that’s ever happened to him. “You know, they say that patience is a virtue.”

“Who’s they?” She inquires dryly. He traces the pad of his thumb over the shape of her kiss-swollen lips, memorizing them with a savage sort of pride.

“Fools,” Kieran purrs. When his mouth closes on hers again, her fingers part just enough to allow for him to catch ephemeral vignettes that make him feel feral and desperate: A wiry, self-assured sort of mouth, a pale strip of moonstruck jawbone, the battering pulse-point at the base of her neck.

With a low grunt, he circles his arm around her waist andlifts her up onto the edge of the bar top so that he’s standing between her legs. Her position perched above him owes to the effect of him standing at the foot of her altar, which perhaps isn’t entirely inaccurate. He runs his hand up the smooth planes of her calf and closes it around her kneecap.

“I wish I could see your face,” he says. Kieran taps the back of her hand that’s covering his eyes. “As much as I’m enjoying the mystery.”

Her hand curls around his collar, drawing him back to her. “Don’t do that.”

“Do what?” Kieran asks sweetly.

“You know exactly what.”

She quiets him by placing her lips against the side of his neck, gently sucking the skin between her teeth. Kieran tips his head forward until it rests against her shoulder, his palm curved around her waist. 

“On second thought,” he murmurs, “We could just stay like this forever.”

She hums thoughtfully against his ear. “I think they’d kick us out eventually.” Her hand drifts over his shoulder and then rests there, a warm weight tethering him to the ground.

Kieran tilts his chin up and presses her mouth against his once more. This kiss is sweeter than the last, as long and slow as a summer afternoon, their tongues drifting over each another’s in a lazy, unhurried cadence. But there’s something nestled just underneath it, too, a hesitation that he can’t immediately place. She pulls away suddenly, breathing hard into the crook of his shoulder.

“We can’t do this,” she pants. “We can’t.”

The words stun him into silence for a long moment. “Of course we can,” he responds slowly. “We just did. Repeatedly.” He’s sure of it, being that it was the best thing that’s ever happened to him, and possibly the history of mankind.

“This is…”

Kieran shakes his head desperately. He knows that she feels it, too, this electric, impossible thing. He _knows_ that it thrums through her like a lightning rod, splits through the dark spaces until there’s room for him to fit between them.

“This can’t happen,” she finishes. “I don’t even _know_ you.”

He moves his hand over hers to lift her palm off of his eyes and she tightens her grip. When she speaks, her voice is paper-thin. “Don’t.” 

“I _want_ you to know me.”

Except that isn’t true, not really. He doesn’t want her to know him like this, dirty and feral and unforgivable. His heart thrums painfully in his throat when she shifts further away from him, cold air leaking miserably into the gaps she used to occupy.

“Run away with me,” Kieran replies hoarsely. He doesn’t have a plan, nor a compass, nor a map. He threw all of those things off of the edge of the cliff the moment she took his hand. “We’ll go somewhere—”

“You’re being crazy,” she whispers.

“I don’t care.” He roves his lips over her cheek and finds that it’s wet with tears, her skin tasting of salt and honey, bittersweet in all things. Kieran presses feverish kisses across her chin, her nose, her jaw, murmuring delusional promises against the places his lips touch, making plans they’ll never keep. “Don’t cry, sweetheart,” he whispers pleadingly.

She initiates their next kiss, and it’s savage, punishing, christening. Her mouth tastes like salt and things unsaid, and when she speaks again, it cuts him more deeply than the crack of any whip he’s ever cowered under. “We can’t.”

“I love you,” he breathes.Kieran grasps her hand and presses it roughly to his chest. He needs her to feel his heart thrumming wildly for her under her palm, the same place where he once traced maps into her skin. He needs her to know that the useless, infected organ is hers, irrevocably. It’s nothing, but it’s all he has to give. _I love you. I love you. I love you._

He feels her sob carve through him cruelly. It’s a heated blade, wounding and cauterizing. Kieran folds his mouth over hers desperately, quieting her. She doesn’t have to say that she loves him too, because he knows this fundamentally, as plainly as though the words were written over her skin, etched into the spaces between her heartbeats, folded under her tongue.

When she speaks again, it’s directly against his lips.

“I’m sorry.”

* * *

**XX26**

**JUNE**

She loses everything that day.

When witness testimonies fall, and Lauren’s case fails, the judge decrees Sake not guilty.

 _“He’s lying!”_ she shrieks anyway, banging her hands on the table. In that moment, the girl known as Lauren Sinclair has long faded away, awash in the river of her grief and guilt. She has driven the spear called revenge into her own heart and watched her own soul disappear. She is something cruel. She is something impossibly wicked. She is so, so naive and foolish. _“He’s lying! I know he is!”_

Nothing works.

He walks free.

And the IU escorts her like a prisoner, eyes that had once looked at her with fondness now filled with distrust.

Perhaps even hate.

Will is waiting for her when the case is done. She runs up to him at the same time he does. The blue and gold officer uniform is on him, and he cups her face in his hands, shaking his head. “Are you alright? What happened in there?”

“I--” She’d very much like to break down. But she can’t. “I--”

 _He_ appears again.

Before she can react, Will catches sight of the tremble in her fingers and the deathly way she looks at Tim Sake, currently being assisted out of the courtroom surrounded by his attorneys and a select few reporters flashing cameras at the entire incident. March and the others cannot be too far behind.

“Let’s go,” he blurts out, and before she can take another step forward, he tugs her aside, hand clenching around the fabric of her sleeve tightly. His blue eyes are cold as they round the corner into a hallway, and that’s when she tears herself away from him, shaking her head.

“Lauren, don’t--”

“What?” she spits out, and the force of her retort shocks even her. He reels back slightly, face contorting. “What did you think I was about to do?”

“Doesn’t matter now,” he mutters, looking down. “But please, Lauren. Stay away from him. He’s no good for you. You lost the case. It’s over and done with. You could still come back from this.”

“I already know that,” she exclaims. “You think I don’t realize I lost yet? And no, I _can’t._ We both graduated early. We’re supposed to be better than this in their eyes. March and the entire IU already treat me like fragile glass, and you’re alright with the APD, but your father--”

“Can we _please_ not discuss my father?!” Will snaps.

“Then let’s not talk about how hellish this entire thing is!” she shrieks. Somewhere, she can hear the courtroom doors close. Sake has exited the building. Most likely he will lose the reporters down the street and walk home alone. He has been cleared, after all, and poses no threat under the council’s eye.

An idea shoots through her mind. It’s practically a death sentence, but she can’t find it in herself to care. The entire world has deemed her mad.

 _Mad._ Gone insane with rage.

She’s faster than he is. Lauren manages to catch her friend off guard as she forces him against the wall, his back to her chest. In one silent motion, she slips his gun into her holster, one hand clamped over his mouth. He makes a loud noise of protest, but she presses down on the yell harder.

“I’m sorry about this,” she murmurs in his ear, genuinely meaning every bit of it, before she lets go and starts running. She slips on a pair of black gloves as she does.

William Hawkes uses a Browning XX25 make, not like her Smith & Wesson.

Without her fingerprints, they won’t be able to track her.

She finds Sake alone in an alleyway. And when he sees her, he throws a smirk her way - a smirk that makes her blood boil, her bones ache, her fingers clamp over the trigger of a pistol and yearn for release. Her savior is a bullet. Her body is a gun.

“Well, well, well,” he taunts. “Detective, to what do I owe the pleasure? Oh, correction. Off--”

“You’re going to walk back in there,” she grits out, hands tight around the Browning.

“No, I don’t think I will.” He smiles even wider, an ugly smirk carving its way onto his pale and scarred face. “If I don’t, what are you going to do, shoot me? The court has deemed me innocent. I’m a free man. You…” Sake makes a noise of pity. “Poor little rich girl didn’t get what she wanted, and now she’s throwing a temper tantrum, ain’t she?”

_“Shut up--!”_

“Even if you had managed to convince them, you know the reports would’ve backed me up,” he says, walking forward. His sneer makes her want to forget the gun and simply strike him across the cheek. “It’s a terrible thing, really. On top of the world at - what, twenty one, now? How the mighty have fallen. Get used to it, Sinclair. You lost. Your mommy and daddy are gone. Your uncle can’t get you out of this one. Your legacy’s in shambles, and the entire city thinks you’ve gone insane. You lived on a throne of arrogance and lies and in the end, turned out to be no better than any of them.”

The next few words out of his mouth are the killing blow.

“Turned out to be no better than your parents, anyhow.”

She doesn’t remember the tears falling as she shoots. She doesn’t remember aiming for his stomach. But Lauren feels his blood spattering across the sleeve of her shirt, and when he falls, gasping for breath, clutching at his lower abdomen, she just stands there. Her gaze is lifeless as she hovers over his body, watching him look up at her with wide eyes.

_I could let you die._

_I could let you die._

_I could_ let you die.

Lauren moves to cover up his wound anyway, tossing her gloves into her pocket as she covers the wound up, fingers staining red as she presses down. In a rush, she throws the gun to the side, ruffling her hair, pinching parts of her skin to give off the impression of bruises.

“You’re insane,” Sake coughs out, still looking at her with that odd expression. “You’re actually insane--”

“You are going to listen to me,” she growls. “You’re not going to tell the medics I call here in a second that I shot you. They won’t believe _you_ anyhow. And you’re not going to tell them because even if I can’t bring you in in the name of justice, someone else can. There’s enough dirt on you that could be passed off as multiple crimes. Maybe you _didn’t_ murder or _didn’t_ work in explosives, but you could embezzle funds. You could commit arson. You could commit voluntary manslaughter. I could pass the evidence off as some other detective’s work. And if the IU puts two and two together while you’re still rejoicing in your freedom, you won’t have much freedom to begin with. You don’t know what I could do to you. You don’t know how I could destroy you.”

A small smile creeps over his face, even as the sirens whine in the distance. She’s already pressed the button on the radio in her belt.

“You made a wonderful detective,” he rasps. “But Sinclair... _you make a beautiful criminal.”_

* * *

Months pass inconsequentially, and Kieran picks up a series of bad habits out of boredom and dull, nagging curiosity. The vice du jour is alcohol.

“You look like you’re nursing a hell of a heartbreak.” 

Kieran doesn’t look up to acknowledge the statement. Maintaining equilibrium became exponentially more difficult after the fifth drink. “ _Hmph_ ,” he grunts into the crook of his elbow.

A cup of water materializes in front of his face on the bartop. “Here, kid.”

Kieran lifts his head off of his folded arms and blinks blearily at the man in front of him. He’s middle-aged, paunchy, with wrinkles bracketing his eyes and a thin mustache hanging limply off of his lip. “I ordered a beer,” he slurs. 

The bartender snorts. “I know you did.” 

Kieran returns his head to his folded arms, swallowing back a wave of nausea. He has no idea what time it is. He may well have always been here, as much a fixture of the grimy bar as the flickering overhead lights and the busted window leaking in syrupy balm.

“No, thanks.”

“Suit yourself,” he mutters boredly. “You kids always think you know best.” 

“I know nothing,” Kieran replies, more than a little melodramatically. He picks his head up again. “I’m an idiot.”

The bartender sets his dishtowel onto the counter and quirks a brow into his hairline. “Ah. So you _are_ heartbroken.” 

“How do you know that?” 

The man thins his lips and tilts his head slightly. “You’ve been here every night this week.” 

Kieran pauses, somewhat offended. “Maybe I just like it here.”

“Nobody likes it here.” 

The reply confuses him, but perhaps it’s the buzz. He swirls his pinkie around the lip of the glass musingly.

“So,” the older man inquires, leaning a thick forearm against the edge of the bar. “What did you do?”

Kieran props his chin in his upturned palm. “Do you think that anyone is truly irredeemable?” he asks, in lieu of answering. The alcohol has thickened his speech, so the word ends up sounding more like _irredem-bel._ He shakes his head and tries again. “Irredeemable.”

“I guess that depends,” the bartender replies, shrugging. “What, did you cheat on her, or something?”

Kieran groans, scrubbing a heavy hand over his face. “No. We weren’t even…” He trails off, gesticulating vaguely. “We weren’t _technically_ dating.”

The man looks thoroughly confused. “So you _weren’t_ dating,” he echoes slowly.

“Not exactly,” Kieran mutters. “Forget it.” He fishes a few crumpled bills out of his pocket and presses them onto the counter. “Thanks, anyway.”

The bartender scoops up the bills and dusts them against his shirt, studying Kieran speculatively for a moment. “Not that you’re asking for my opinion,” he remarks gruffly, “But if you really like this girl, I think you should tell her how you feel. Whatever you did can’t have been that bad.”

“But what if it is?” He hesitates, one hand curled over the doorknob. “That bad, I mean.”

The man looks up from the spot he’s rubbing on the bar top. “In that case,” he replies, “Then I think you’ve got bigger problems to deal with.”

Kieran bursts out laughing. He realizes that he must look a little crazy, but he can’t help it. It’s funny in the way that deeply unfunny things always somehow manage to be.

“If only you knew the half of it.”

* * *

The whispers start as soon as she gets released from the interrogation room.

Hermann had looked down at her with a snide expression on his face, gray eyes emotionless. She supposes he’ll be her new boss; as Captain of the APD. As an officer, she’ll be serving directly under Tristan, merged with the entity that houses her long-time friend - and Kym Ladell.

It’ll be nice to have some company after all this, she supposes.

Company that doesn’t know that at her heels, shadows pounce and tear at her with fangs, stay in her lap like beastly dogs that demand their penance of revenge. All the IU can see her hurt and trauma, cracked open and split open with a knife for all inquiring minds to see. That’s the thing she hates about the investigative unit, really. They’re all like her. They all like a puzzle.

But she was one of the few who was able to solve theirs.

 _Something about Sake’s shooting doesn’t seem right,_ she’d heard Cooper say to March, earlier.

_The alibis add up. Sinclair couldn’t have shot him; the gun didn’t match her signature. And she showed signs of a struggle--_

_Who did, then? Some random witness?_

_Potentially._

_You and I know that’s absolute garbage._

Lauren smirks mirthlessly, her visage hidden by strands of auburn. It had been easy to burn and raze the evidence. Set fire to a pair of gloves. Lie about the scuffle. Making sure that there had been eyewitnesses to see her supposingly saving Sake.

_I told you they wouldn’t be able to take me in, you coward._

But her victory doesn’t last. The entire office goes silent once the door to the IU shuts. Grace and Andrew avert their eyes as they rush back into the forensic room. She knows what they all think of her now. Some unstable girl who once had a talent the law would kill to have. Their fallen prodigy.

_You cannot have someone like her in your ranks, Detective March._

And despite Tristan’s protests, he was forced to concede to the Colonel eventually.

Lauren doesn’t say a word as she packs up her belongings in a cardboard box. Once she’s done, she hauls up her maroon-red coat and badge, along with her flat cap, tossing them into her arms. She throws them unceremoniously onto March’s desk, the man himself staring up at her as she practically slams down her coat.

“My badge,” Lauren says in a monotone, tossing it his way. March looks up with her with something that resembles pity, and it takes all her willpower not to scream in his face about how he did this to her. How they all did this to her.

If she’d won the case - won it all - she would’ve been his superior by now.

“You were our most valuable asset,” he murmurs. “And for that, I am truly sorry.”

_You have all forsaken me, don’t you dare act like you cared about me, don’t you dare--_

Lauren’s mouth twists into a silent snarl, but she quells down any protests as she exits the IU for the last time.

The door slams shut without a noise.

* * *

His final letter is tucked between the bulging folds of an old sketchbook and shoved into the corner of his bookshelf.

_I told you that I don’t remember much of my childhood, but that’s not exactly true. So, here’s a memory: I tried to save a baby bird once. I was eleven. I wasn’t allowed to have a pet, so I kept it hidden a shoebox in my bedroom. The bird was sickly, far too small, which I suppose is the reason it was pushed from its nest. I’d wake in the night and smooth its downy feathers under my thumb, wondering how someone could abandon something so fragile._

_Of course, I knew nothing about caring for birds, and the endeavor was ultimately fruitless. As it got weaker, I swore I could save it, if only I tried harder. And perhaps that’s my problem — I never have been good at letting things go. It was only after it died that I realized that it would have been better off had I left it alone._

_This is the last letter I’ll write you. I’ve spent a lifetime chasing ghosts, and I can’t bear to make you one of them._

_The only problem is that I still remember all of it. I remember how you moved, how you breathed, how you kissed me. I remember the first time that I traced your palm under my thumb, and how impossible it seemed that such soft hands could belong to such a wicked girl. I remember the way you told me what you wanted with your teeth, drawing my lip between them, biting just hard enough to smart. That was what loving you felt like: The stinging pain that preceded the callus, that infinitesimal moment of hurt before it gave way to something better._

_You’re as alive as you ever were, in my head and on my lips and all over my apartment. If what we had is just some twitching, sickly creature in a shoebox, I don’t know how I’m supposed to let it die._

_I should have left you alone._

_I’m sorry I didn’t._

_-Blanc_

* * *

**XX27**

**PRESENT DAY**

He keeps rambling about things.

They’re quite boring. She can’t bother to listen to them as she sips her coffee, gaze eventually wandering astray to inspect the passerby outside. Ardhalis is on the vestige of winter, but fall colors still stay, casting warm golds and oranges into the inside of the cafe.

She could be anywhere else right now, but no, she’s stuck with someone who’s ability at conversational talk is drier than--

“Lauren? Are you listening?”

“Hm?” She pipes up immediately, irises widening.

“Your eyes look pensive today. But I must admit, I’ve never seen such pretty golden eyes before.”

 _That’s what they do when I’m bored._ She resists the urge to roll them. _Moron._

She makes a profile in her head, writing down the details as if she’s inspecting a victim rather than a date. Between the two sexes of the human race, he certainly doesn’t catch the eye. Lauren’s found more women and men with an inkling of interesting traits to at least concentrate on with fascination, but he is so terribly...dull. _Dull._ 5’9, hazel eyes and hair. Evans. Evans. Dull name. Dull life. Dull job.

“I presume your beauty and charm have left behind a trail of heartbroken men.”

And _then,_ “Dull” Evans has the audacity to _wink_ at her.

She nearly throws up in her mouth.

_Think of the sea. Blueberry scones. Any other date. Think of any other date. There was that one Kingsley man. Colin; you met him at a holiday party. Audrey, she had pretty blue eyes--_

An alleyway, a bar, a kiss.

Lauren almost freezes up there and then, but laughs on cue. “Thank you, Mr. Evans, but I highly doubt it. But if I ever did, I must have been too focused on my work to notice.”

 **“Oh yes, I understand. It’s the same for me.”** He smiles. “My parents own the Evans company, and I’m supposed to take up the business after them. **So I’ve been working hard to not disappoint them.”**

Her right eye twitches as he continues. **“But all they ever care about is how I’m twenty-eight and still not married! I mean, I’m single, so what? It’s okay to--”**

She really does roll her eyes then. _God, this bastard is cheating on his wife._

As if on cue, a familiar petite figure passes by the window, with a shock of dark sapphire hair. Kym’s bright hazel eyes widen as she catches Lauren’s equally shocked gaze, grinning as she waves to herself like some sort of comedian mime. _Aye, Lauren!_ she mouths through the glass. _It’s me!_

 _Kym,_ she whines in her head.

 **“You know, I really respect the risks policemen take every day to protect this city…”** Evans continues, as Kym nearly mushes her face up against the glass. Bless her friend for having gotten the cue. Lauren nearly goes into a flying rampage as Evans keeps going on about some instinct and a poor woman, her eyes flitting back and forth between the woman and her date.

_Save me, please._

“It was just the right thing to do!”

Kym salutes, nodding. Without a second’s hesitation, she bangs her head against the glass, making noises akin to that of a fish underwater. Lauren bolts upright from her seat, standing rapidly.

“Oh no, Dear Lord!” she exclaims, her voice taking on the tone not too dissimilar to that of an elderly posh woman’s. “It is my blind friend! Please excuse me, Mr Evans - I must go help her! **It was nice meeting you!”**

 _“You can’t just run off like that!”_ he exclaims, grabbing her wrist. _“Don’t make me waste my time!”_

“You’re right,” she drawls, and something cracks in her. If anyone had bore witness to it besides her and a mostly empty cafe - they would’ve called it a reemergence of the girl that had existed a year ago, a fox in human form with a heart of steel and nerves of iron. But she only appears for a second. “You really shouldn’t waste time on me,” Lauren sneers, pulling his arm aside in her vice-like grip. “Maybe use it to help your company out for real this time...or spend more of that _time_ with your _wife?”_

It’s an unfair display of her ability.

It’s risky, and unhinged, and puts a target on her back in plain daylight.

But she doesn’t care.

She stopped caring a long time ago.

“What?”

“That poor woman…” she continues, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth in an admonishing manner, “married to a cheating bastard like you. But you know,” and she lets him go, “even though you’re such a human disgrace, I’ve still dedicated my life to protecting ungrateful bastards like you. It’s just like _instinct,_ you know?”

When he turns to look back at her, she throws him a wink, running a hand through her auburn hair.

“Have a _lovely_ day, Mr. Evans,” she purrs, and vanishes in a flurry of skirts.

Neither her nor Evans spot the man in the backdrop of the cafe smiling tightly over his coffee. It fades after Lauren and Kym disappear from sight, and turns into a shaky grimace over his cup. He shakes like he’s just been stabbed in the chest with a knife, fingers unsteady on the paper he holds.

And slowly, slowly, his cold blue eyes harden, whatever emotion there was left in them gone forever.

* * *

Kieran has imagined his death in a thousand iterations, but never in a sunlit coffee shop.

She sweeps in on a wave of heady citrus and sweet smoke, her skirt fanning around her pale calves like an ebbing tide. He nearly drops his mug when he sees her, not only because she’s deliriously beautiful, but because he _knows_ that mouth, tipped up into the vague suggestion of a smirk. He knows the delicate slant of her shoulder blades, the way the creamy expanse of skin at the hollow of her throat tastes under his tongue.

It’s her. It was always her, his detective, his _Noire._ Three years have passed, but he will always recognize the girl who once ran headlong into the terrible thing rather than far away from it. She looks exactly as he thought she would, all vulpine edges, sharp enough to cut. Her attention drifts listlessly over the café, finding him for the briefest moment before settling on some point just out of his periphery.

She’s on a date with a man who isn’t him, an observation only made more agonizing by how uninterested he is in her company. If he were paying attention, he’d be hopelessly endeared by her wit, sharp and self-assured and a little bit mean, but only when she knows she’s right. He’d fall for the way she tilts her head before she asks a question, how she speaks very quickly when she’s passionate, how she inhales slightly before she laughs. If he were lucky, perhaps she’d even kiss him. Then he’d know that she shares her heart in the same way that she moves through the world, as recklessly and brilliantly as a downpour.

Kieran nearly stands, but then he remembers himself. She doesn’t know it, but they are back in the place where they started, only in reverse. Looking, but not touching. This will end at the precise moment that he steps out of the café. She will live her hapless, gold spun life, and he will smother this feeling like a windpipe under his thumb.

This ending is fitting, perhaps. The unwilling executioner assumes the role of the judge.

It isn’t funny, and still, he laughs.

* * *

Watching him go is satisfying, admittedly. Evans is a cowardly man, not worthy of any woman. But the emptiness in her chest only yawns further as the cafe door slams shut, bell tinkling above the glass. Kym keeps talking, asking her about her date, and she looks down at her outfit for only a brief moment - lovely brown skirt down to her knees, pressed shirt with a bow tied neatly on the collar. Something incredibly elegant and feminine, the latter which she never had a tendency to display, only on special occasions and forced ones. She knows what is missing, even now.

“Still, though, I’m fascinated by how unlucky you are with all these weirdos you’re trying to date. Please don’t say this one told you your eyes are pensive too?”

Lauren rolls her eyes, her arm slung around Kym’s shoulders. “Don’t even get me started. Uncle says dating is a part of moving on, but--”

_Like I could ever move on from--_

_Get him out of your head,_ she thinks, mouth contorting into a harsh line. It has been two years. She will not mess up again. She will not make the same mistakes again. _You can’t fall in love with someone you barely knew._

 _You loved him, though._ The thought comes swift and sudden, stabbing her in the back. _Didn’t you? The rest will not do._

She spots a newsboy holding up papers. The rest of her regrets enter her mind.

“Hey,” Kym reprimands, frowning. Her friend can read her too easily. Sometimes it terrifies her.

“Only five cents! Ten years! Retrospective on the Allendale Train Station Tragedy!”

“I’m fine, Kym.”

For now.

Only for now.

After thanking the boy and paying him for Le Journal, Lauren flips open the paper, eyes running through the articles until her eyes catch the word Allendale. She doesn’t get a chance to read properly, however, as Kym slings an arm around her neck, joyously ramming her head into her slender shoulder.

“Come on, Lauren! Tell me more about your date!”

“Okay,” she says, chuckling a bit, “you’re not going to believe this. So, first, he…”

* * *

He’s summoned for his next mission that very same evening, though this one has urgency attached to it. “A two for one special,” Kieran remarks flatly.

“De La Rocca and Grayson have become … problematic,” The Messenger replies. He heaves a bored sigh, as though he finds the whole affair terribly inconvenient.“We have reason to suspect that they’re both working with the police.”

Kieran’s chest tightens as he skims over the contents of the mission. He thinks of her before he can stop himself and then shakes his head, dispelling the thought like a plume of smoke. “How exceptionally stupid,” he replies blithely.

“You are to dispose of the targets and sweep their apartments for any evidence related to the attempted infiltration.”

“Naturally,” Kieran murmurs absently, thumbing through the file.

“Two targets in one night shouldn’t be a problem, of course,” The Messenger continues, and something in his tone gives Kieran pause. There’s something sharp nestled beneath the veneer of velvet diplomacy when he tilts his masked head and adds, almost as an afterthought, “After Hanbury.”

Kieran’s gaze collides with the black mesh of the Messenger’s mask through the confessional grate and stays there for a long moment. It’s funny, he thinks, how quickly a single, thoughtless word can dispel a memory. He’s back in that bitter alleyway again, crushing a heedless girl to his chest, lips pressed against her cold ear, pleading with her not to look.

_There is a cavern in your chest that she used to fill, and she’ll haunt it like a wraith. When you dream of her, it will be the taste of saltwater on her cheeks that you’ll recall first, the wasted tears for a man she never knew. This is the fate that you deserve._

“Yes,” Kieran replies woodenly. “It shouldn’t be a problem at all.”

“Do be more careful this time around,” the Messenger warns. “You almost got caught three years prior.”

Kieran’s body stills, one foot poised out the door. Dread pools in his stomach as he turns, knowing, preternaturally, that this is the final blow. He knows this in the same way that the rodent knows to cower in the underbrush just by the shift in barometric pressure preceding the storm.

He asks anyway. “What?”

“Hanbury,” the Messenger clarifies. “After that incident, the APD nearly caught onto us. Onto _you_. We managed to take out one of their own, but the detective behind your case was fired before we got to assassinate her as well.”

“A detective,” he breathes, low and shallow, a blade edging at the tip of his foolish heart.

_It can’t be—_

“She was hunting you down,” the masked man replies. “I believe they called her _Sinclair.”_

_The moon._

_Night._

_Black._

So here it is, then.

His lover, his huntress, his enemy.

How else was the story supposed to end?

* * *

She comes home late.

Tristan doesn’t need to know why, nor does Lucy - the maid she bumps into in the foyer. Her facade is a perfect one, now. Peaceful and quiet and welcoming. A slightly shy, albeit hardworking girl.

“I think I’ll go catch up on some paperwork. You should sleep soon!” she calls down to the maid, smiling.

“Yes, I will. Your uncle is already asleep,” Lucy calls back kindly. “Have a good night nonetheless, Lady Lauren.”

When she gets up to her room, she sets the paper on the table. Her mind is already hard at work, the cogs turning in their wheels. She should really let go - but can’t. It’s a well-versed recitation in her head at this point as she sits down, tying her hair up in a bun, inspecting the paper.

And barely two minutes later, the phone rings.

“Officer Sinclair here,” she answers briskly, the title stinging her tongue even now. But it fades. The first time she’d said it, she’d wanted to throw up. “An emergency? What happened? 45 Whiteriver Street? Yes, I’ll be there.”

It’s habit, now. Throwing on a navy coat instead of a maroon one. No cap. Same tie and boots. A mask. Always the mask.

So it goes.

* * *

It’s all going swimmingly until De La Rocca decides to pull a gun.

Grayson went down quickly. Kieran shoved the blade into her heart at the same time that she bit down on the flesh of his palm, puncturing two neat divots under his thumb. He left her splayed out on the floor with one hand grasping for the hallway, as though frozen in the position of a crawl, reduced to infancy in her final moment.

De La Rocca, however, puts up a fight. It’s somewhat commendable, that scrappy audacity. When he pulls his pistol out, it’s so reminiscent of the night of Angoisse’s death, but this time, Kieran doesn’t hesitate to kill him. He has peeled back the decaying exoskeleton of the person he was three years prior, excised himself of the impervious, softened flesh he once wore. There exists only barbed wire and broken glass in place of where it used to be, a twisted, glittering mural. He arrives branded with an occupational hazard: Fall on him and you might risk cutting yourself.

“A gunshot!” A woman shouts, her panicked cry surfacing resonantly above the clamor. “Across the street!”

The sirens are already swirling around Grayson’s apartment across the street, which means he has approximately fifteen seconds to make himself scarce. Kieran glances out the window, then back to De La Rocca’s crumpled body. His gaze is blown wide in horror, twin gooseberries fixed eternally on an unseeing path.

“ _Adieu,_ ” he mutters, laying the hyacinth neatly over his leaking chest. He throws open the window and leaps like a lynx into the bitter night.

* * *

When she arrives, Will and Kym are already with the patrol unit as sergeant and lieutenant, respectively. It’s good to see them again, and they prove a fortunate distraction from March’s arrival. When he smiles, it’s difficult to meet his gaze, but she does anyway.

He cares for her. He still does. But the law presides above all.

The IU is halfway through rattling down the facts of the murder, and Will is busy comforting the woman who stumbled out of the building, when the gunshots sound throughout the air. Her friend waves them over, and they begin pursuit.

But the shadow across the rooftops catches her attention first, and before either of her companions can shout _no, don’t, you’ll get killed,_ she leaps like a fox onto a ledge, then another, then onto a roof until she’s running parallel to the--

Sword. Coat. Gloves and a mask.

\-- _killer._

_He’s fast._

_I can be faster._

She starts running directly after him, leaping from roof to roof. And when she’s close enough to grab the sleeve of his coat, he spreads out his arms, like an eagle, and falls.

He grins at her while he does.

_If you think I’ll let you slip through my fingers…_

He drops down in an alleyway, and she follows barely a second later. When he grabs onto a wall, hauling himself up, she leaps on top of him, kicking at his face, harshly. He falls, but she’s dragged down with him, and barely contains a yell as a sharp pain ricochets up her arm, blood trickling down pale skin. When he tumbles to the ground, her gun falls out of its hold, and she doesn’t get a chance to retrieve it as he slams her against the wall, barely pausing to slam a heel against her face, her mask tumbling to the wayside.

They move like a dance.

They move with no precision, they move like animals.

When he catches her, she sees two things.

One, the flash of metal at her throat.

Two, something so incredibly human and warm that it eclipses the cold press of a katana blade to the skin of her neck.

_You hesitated, and I didn’t know why._

Looking into his eyes is like treading tide pools of cyan and turquoise, framed by artfully windswept black locks around his jaw, mussed in a knot at the nape of his neck. She knows this presence. She would know it anywhere. Two years is hardly any distance. But it’s not the distance that hurts.

_If only I had, everything would’ve been different._

She did not expect her lover to be so heartless.

She did not expect her enemy to be the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen.

It hits her, then.

_My enemy._

She strikes with the precision of a viper, kicking him straight across the head. He falls to the ground far too easily for an assassin who’s been terrorizing Ardhalis with ease, but she doesn’t question it as she rushes to pin him down with one knee, her leg pressing into the curve of his vertebrae. Her hands shake as she cuffs his two hands together, but she manages to steady her left as she grabs her gun, occupied by two bullets left in its cylinder.

Lauren is no stranger to rage, and right now, she lets it take her over, the cool metal on her skin a balm.

“You have the right to remain silent,” she says coldly, the blood on her arm and face rapidly drying in the air. “Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.”

He looks up at her with a grin, twin blue eyes twinkling with enough mirth to rival any star, and she feels the hatred in her chest _burst._ This man has haunted the city she loves. This man has been among the phantoms that have called her name and told her that she cannot possibly take down a lying crowd of thousands. It is a welcome feeling, the impulse to drag the barrel of her gun across his cheek like a caress and shoot. It is disgusting how when he smiles wider, her breath catches for only a mere second.

_I love you._

_I hate you._

_You wretched thing._

“Don’t even bother,” he purrs. “I’ll be gone before you even finish reading me my rights.”

“You just committed _murder,_ you filthy scumbag,” she spits, pressing the gun to his temple harder. “You’re not getting off the hook anytime soon - that you can be sure of.”

“Oh yeah?” He is immune. He is taking everything from her and she _detests--_ “And what do you plan to do with a filthy scumbag like me?”

“Whatever’s needed to deliver you into the arms of justice.”

He laughs again. “Darling, we both know you’re not going to shoot me.”

And then he _shifts._ This time, Lauren bites down on a howl of rage - or perhaps something akin to a vengeful desire - as one of his hands pressed underneath her leg grips onto her like a claw. Their skin does not meet, and yet, it’s as if lightning has struck her veins. The line between violence and gentleness is a small one, and when he brushes a finger against her thigh, she knows it’s to calculate the time and occasion that would best suit him to free himself of his cuffs, tackle her to the ground, and brush a hand over the low of her back, counting where he can best drive a sword through her midriff.

But she was open before.

She was easy prey.

She was the mark.

_Why?!_

Lauren stops their banter early by clicking the button on her radio. But he interrupts, because of course he does. “You shouldn’t do that.”

“And why not?” she spits, trying so, so hard to quell the pain in her chest.

“Because you and I share the same goal,” he says, eyes still void of any emotion he might’ve once had for her, “which is to find the Leader and destroy him. Face it, the police will never catch him. Even the assassins don’t know where or who he is. I’m no exception. But...if you really want to keep your _promise,_ I would be your best asset.”

She hisses. “You think I’d associate with a _bastard_ like you?! You’re daydreaming.”

_Feel it. Do you feel it? Do you hurt the way you hurt me?_

“As much as I trust my own abilities,” he says coolly, “I know I won’t be able to find him alone. I need an assistant who is able to feed me information and albis. You know, a little pet?”

Kill him.

She should kill him right here and right now.

“If you’re fool enough to try to throw me in jail, you won’t get anything out of me. Besides. Either way, I’m going to escape.”

_“You’re cuffed with a gun pointed at your head.”_

“Aw, please! That’s insulting. I’m an assassin, darling,” he purrs, and the threat sends shivers down her spine. “Did you really think handcuffs or some bars could stop me?”

Just to prove his point, he waves his gloved hands in front of her face.

Lauren doesn’t get a chance to react as he tackles her to the ground, his weight far heavier than her own. Her gun goes flying out of her hands, and he pins her arm down as he points the tip of his katana at her throat, straddling her hips. She is drowning. She is drowning in his scent, blood and woodsmoke and the aftermath of a heady bonfire. He is the same, and so completely different. “You were right about one thing though, _officer,”_ he says, and the title is a disgrace on his tongue. “We are monsters. I kill without hesitation, and **I have no regrets**.”

The lie hits her directly in the chest, a pointed arrow flung into her heart. The oceans of blue she never got to look at are cold, iced-over, emotionless. The man who loved her is gone. The man who loved a singular fragment of her is gone - for how could he have loved her without knowing all of her? He could not, he could not, and it was all a _lie--_

_Monster. Man._

When he trails the sword over her neck, she doesn’t even wince at the threat.

He kissed her there, once.

“I’m off anyways,” he says, smirking as he tucks the blade back into his sheath. “I’ll give you twenty-four hours to mull it over. If you’re interested, meet me at the bridge at midnight tomorrow. _Don’t_ be late. Sleep well!”

And just like that, he’s gone.

She almost touches the cut at her throat, but resists. Lauren hesitates only for a second before she struggles up off the ground, pressing the button on her radio.

_“Officer Sinclair here. I have lost the target.”_

It’s as if she’s been torn apart and placed back together with the greatest agony alive. Her hair is disheveled, almost coming out of its bun, blood drying on her cheek and neck both. Lauren’s mind is swimming with far too many thoughts at once, but eventually, one latches on like a hook.

_Just now, was he…?_

_Lying,_ comes the impulse. _He was lying. You know it. Surely there is a human behind the monster, one who does have regrets._

Her hand flies to her neck, tracing the cut. She understands what the feeling is now, then. Hatred. Oh, how she has not felt it for ages. It’s a welcome friend and a dreaded enemy both, making her quiver with hot anger. She bends over slightly, clutching at her arms, teeth gnashed so hard together she fears she’ll break a canine. In her life, two versions exist of this stranger: the one who whispers in her ear and tells her not to look, kisses her senseless in some far-away bar, and the one who would kill her without a second’s thought and treats cuts and bruises like a string of pearls as gift to a lover.

She stands there for a while, paused in time. She wants to punch something. To feel. To ache. To hold his hand in hers again. Most of all, she wants to scream at the sky, shriek an unknown name like a curse and a prayer on her tongue.

 _Look at what you've done,_ she wants to yell. _Look at what you've done to me._

_The bridge._

A past they once knew.

She cannot love two people at the same time.

But she can hate a murderer, a wicked thing in accordance with her own soul.

And that hate blossoms into a field of flowers when a certain Captain Hermann, two blocks away, in the midst of red and blue police sirens and a bag full of purple petals, tells her that he is the Purple Hyacinth.

How ironic, that the one ghost she let go of has come back to haunt her, then.

Maybe the saying’s true, then.

If you hate something enough, let it go, and it’ll come back to you eventually.

But she hadn’t hated him at first, had she? Despite knowing they were on opposite sides of _something._ She’d chosen him and he’d chosen her through the lies, the war, the supposed truth that stood high above it all: loneliness. How fitting that she has ended up with someone just as brutal as she. If Ardhalis is as cruel as she knows it to be, then it has turned two strangers turned into enemies forevermore. If Ardhalis is as tragic as she knows it to be, this is where one chapter ends and another begins. They will go down in some unknown history as infamous star-crossed lovers gone wrong, criminal and prodigy, prodigy and criminal hand in hand.

But she’s not going to stick around for the ending.

She has another story to pursue.

* * *

He dreams of Angoisse for the final time that night.

“You make an awful criminal,” he comments. It begins in the same way that it always does, with the old man bleeding out in front of him. “You can’t seem to let this go, can you?” 

“Can’t,” Kieran mutters, twisting the hilt of his katana in his palm.

Angoisse laughs wetly at that, a gurgling noise like a bath plug that’s been pulled loose. “How very noble of you.” He rises to his knees and then pauses, looking at Kieran with a faint smirk, one eye squinted in shrewd appraisal. “A regular martyr.”

“That’s me,” Kieran replies dryly. When he raises the blade, Angoisse doesn’t move for his gun as he normally would. He is stock-still, poised in place like a chess piece.

“What a tragic end to your love story,” he murmurs. “Star-crossed lovers, fated to walk different paths.”

“You have an awful lot to say this evening,” Kieran replies coldly. Angoisse isn’t usually so chatty in these dreams, though he supposes they’re overdue for a change in the script.“If you’re quite finished with the formalities, I’d love to skip to the ending.”

“An idiotic boy, at the end of it all,” Angoisse spits. He chuckles, a harsh, gutturalsound. “You thought—” Angoisse bends forward and steels his palms against his knees, overcome with mirth. He writhes grotesquely, still sputtering, quakingwith laughter. “You thought you could leave it all _behind—_ ”

“Shut up,” Kieran spits.

“Play house together, maybe even—” Angoisse wipes a tear at the corner of his eye, “—have a child or two.”

Kieran sinks to his knees, his blade clattering to the floor at his feet. He cups his palms over his ears, humming against the noise, but Angoisse’s voice surfaces over the din like pond scum. “The look on her face when she found out what you really are,” he sputters. “Unforgettable.”

“ _Shut up!_ ”

Kieran crumples, panting, his forehead pressed flush against the ground. He only registers that he’s begun to cry when he tastes the salt on his tongue, burning the flesh of his raw throat like acid. “Shut up.”

Angoisse’s laughter wanes until the only sound that remains is the rhythmic pattering of his leaking wound. “You know how this ends.”

He is still prone on the floor, bent inward like a dying thing. “I’ve always known.” Kieran leans forward andcloses his fingers around the pistol on the man’s hip. It’s been some time since he’s held a gun, but he loathes the feel of it all the same, cold and slippery in his palm. He raises it until the barrel is pointed squarely at Angoisse’s gaunt, unsmiling face.

“Finish it, then,” he murmurs. “For good, this time.”

And so Kieran complies. Cocks the pistol once, twists the barrel around, and pulls the trigger on himself.

* * *

If you want something that bad, you’ve got to go after it.

There’s never been a choice for her, really. Her fate was drawn out in stars, in the letters that spell _tragedy,_ sister to _grief,_ daughter of _death._ So she does the same thing she always does: unlocks the box in her mind, stuffs ten years worth of agony in it, locks it tight, and swallows the key harshly. What lies in front of her is an opportunity - a dangerous one at that. One she will not trust in the slightest. But working with the enemy is a desperate shot, enough to actually be worth something given how little progress she’s made ever since her demotion.

The wind is high tonight, the grandfather clock above Ardhalis chiming midnight.

_I owe it to him to try._

Dylan. Her parents. Allendale.

Everyone she has cried over with bloodied hands.

St. Lawrence Bridge is silent. The fiery balls swirling above Ardhalis hang heavy tonight in the dark sea of the sky, the moon eclipsing her judgement onto a girl with fire-red hair and an ensemble eerily similar to her old detective outfit, minus the tie, substituted for ruffles. Call it nostalgia, perhaps. Call it a refusal to let go of old wounds.

And when she sees him approach this time, _really sees_ him, he’s as stunning as the first time she laid eyes on him. But Lauren doesn’t have to speak the truth they both know. Predator and prey and prey and predator have their own language that goes in circles, a secret language they speak with no one else. Lovers have their own secret code incomprehensible to an outsider. They were neither. They were both.

_You are not the person I knew. I am not the person you knew. We will bury what happened three years ago and plenty more six feet under, and who will arise from the ashes are two completely different people, at the ready with gun and sword. You fall, I let you. You refuse to let me look, I will betray you. You lose, I win._

_Let the stars above bind us._

Tonight marks the closing of an old tale and the beginning of a new one.

“Well, well, well...what do we have here?” taunts the Purple Hyacinth, grinning with a lion’s sneer and a heart twice as hard. “Seems like someone changed their mind about my proposal.”

**_fin_ **

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That’s a wrap, people. If you want more of Astra Inclinant, I might recommend a continuation fic called, I don’t know, Purple Hyacinth?
> 
> Luna here. If you’ll excuse me, both me and Rabbit have to go mend our self-inflicted wounds, and cry over the crimes we’ve committed. However hard you’re wailing, we’re wailing twice as hard. I never thought a day would come when the two biggest HEA enthusiasts would come together to inflict such egregious pain, but that day has come, indeed. On my end, this was my first time writing noir genre fiction - much less psychological thriller. It was painful exploring Lauren’s head, but I knew that her destiny was nothing but tragic in the span of three years leading up to the canon events. And it still is, to some extent - she’s her own antagonist; her own corruption. It certainly hasn’t stopped, and I don’t think it will until she completely succumbs to her own darkness. That’s noir anti-heroes for you, huh?
> 
> Kieran - Rabbit’s Kieran who I will sing praises about until I die - is also tragic, but in the sense he does not want to be. I’ll let his own arc speak for itself: it isn’t really a static arc more than it is the beginning of change. But we all know how things go in the canon, and until he stops making his mistakes, he’s as doomed as Lauren is. Darkness to darkness. But he’s got more potential to redeem himself in either case. Our girl...not so much. 
> 
> And on that note: we’re not sadists, we swear. Astra Inclinant is meant to serve as a flawless tie-in to the canon, not act as a backstory that spells out doom. Purple Hyacinth’s all about second chances, and AI just amps up the theme a bit. And makes it just a bit more angsty. We do love torturing you so :heart:
> 
> Anyways. Donate your tears, shout at us, threaten us with chairs. Just don't make us pay your therapy bills; not all at once, please.


End file.
